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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BOHLEN LECTURES, INAUGURAL SERIES. \V 



FOUR LECTURES 



Delivered in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- 
delphia, in the Year 1877, 



FOUNDATION OF THE LATE JOHN BOHLEN, Esq. 



ALEXANDER H. VINTON, D.D. 



SECOND EDITION. 



NEW YORK : 
THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

2 and 3 Bible House, 
1887. 




St i s 

!S€7 



Printed for the Rector, Churchwardens, 
and Vestrymen of the Church of 
the Holy Trinity, Philadel- 
phia, Trustees of the 
John Bohlen Lect- 
ureship. 



THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 



John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty- 
sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund 
of $100,000, to be distributed to religious and chari- 
table objects in accordance with the well-known wishes 
of the testator. 

By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the 
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and 
paid over to " The Rector, Church-wardens, and 
Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- 
delphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain 
designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of 
$10,000 was set apart for the endowment of The John 
Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and 
conditions : — 

"The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe 
securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called • The John 
Bohlen Lectureship, ' and the income shall be applied annually 
to the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or 
layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred 
copies of two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be 



The John Bohlen Lectureship. 



delivered at such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as 
the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time 
to time determine, giving at least six months' notice to the 
person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may con- 
veniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as 
lecturer a second time within a period of five years. The pay- 
ment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been 
printed and received by the trustees, of all the income for the 
year derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of 
printing the lectures and the other incidental expenses attending 
the same. 

"The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the 
terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton for the 
delivery of what are known as the 'Bampton Lectures,' at 
Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected with or 
relating to the Christian religion. 

" The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of 
May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the 
persons who for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop 
of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is 
the Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said church; the 
Professor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic 
Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the 
Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Phil- 
adelphia. 

"In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may 
nominate the lecturer." 

Under this trust the Kev. Alexander H. Vinton, 
D.D., of Boston, was appointed to deliver the lectures 
for the year 1877. 

Philadelphia., Easter, 1877. 



LECTURE I. 

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 



CONTENTS, 

LECTURE I. 
The Personality of God * 9 

LECTURE II. 
The Tri-persoxality of God 39 

LECTURE III. 
The Atonement 73 

LECTURE IV. 
The Holy Ghost 105 



LECTUKE I. 

THE PERSONALITY OP GOD. 

IN accepting the invitation to inaugurate this 
series of the Bohlen Lectures, I enjoyed a 
peculiar pleasure, a pleasure tinged with the 
sweetness of a certain sadness. 

The title is a memorial of him with whom I 
was once connected by official ties, for whom I 
cherished an affectionate personal regard, and 
whose character I held in most respectful esteem. 
I remembered the kindness of his temper, the 
readiness of his heart, the fixedness of his con- 
science, his unfailing labors of beneficence; in a 
word, I remembered the supremacy of the piety 
that suggested his motives, controlled his life, 
shaped his character, and inspired him with such 
loving consecration of self to his Saviour and 
(9) 



io Lecture First. 



Lord as branched out spontaneously and gladly 
into all good words and works. His religion was 
his life, whose sovereign impulse, the glory of 
Christ, directed itself into all the channels of 
beneficence and subsidized his culture and his 
wealth for the good of his fellow-men. It was in 
perfect keepiug with his character, therefore, that 
his dying wish should be for the holy faith which 
he had loved and lived for and had taught for 
many years to successive classes of young men; 
that his teaching might survive in other utterances 
than his, and still be his ; that in a larger way and 
with a certain perpetuity he might still speak, 
though dead. Hence the institution of this lecture- 
ship, his apt memorial, — better than wreathed 
flowers cast upon his coffin and smothered in his 
grave : living plants, rather, whose fresh fragrance 
is restored as the seasons return; better than mar- 
ble effigy, coldly glittering in its solitariness; a 
memorial, rather, that lives and speaks to passing 
men, and speaks, as he himself would speak, of the 
great salvation. So may these lectures always 
speak, just as he would have them do, of the truth 
as ' t is in Jesus ! 



The Personality of God. Ii 

To this loving recognition, which my heart could 
not refuse, of my former associate and friend, may 
I not add a word, congratulating myself that I 
stand once more before you, the congregation to 
whom fifteen years ago I ministered in the things 
of the gospel ? I do so with the more assurance 
because I know that whatever of superseding in- 
fluences may have come between your hearts and 
me in that long interval, yet the occasion and the 
name it bears will at least gain for me a welcome. 

In suggesting this course of lectures, our friend 
left ample range in the choice of topics. They 
might be gathered from the whole fertile field of 
theology, and grouped at the discretion of the lec- 
turer. As I scanned this field, it was plain that 
among its crowd of theories there were some 
subsidiary doctrines, which had once been inter- 
esting, but had lost their freshness with the ex- 
igency that begat them. 

There were other topics, however, whose im- 
portance is as rich and constant as the relation 
between God and the soul, that are now encoun- 
tering the antagonism of our sceptical and aggres- 
sive age. Of these truths I have made choice of 



12 Lecture First. 



four to be the subjects of as many lectures. The 
first, " The Personality of God " ; the second, " His 
Triune Subsistence" ; the third, " His Redemptive 
Work for Man, the Atonement of Christ" ; and 
the fourth, " His Curative and Sanctifying Agency 
in Man, the Power and Work of the Holy Ghost." 
Whenever unbelief would make its fiercest on- 
slaught upon the faith of Christians, it aims at the 
first of these truths; and whenever the spirit of 
error in the church becomes pronounced, it has 
always selected one or another or all of the other 
three. 

These four truths embody themselves in the 
most prominent statements of our creed, and in 
treating them I will make those statements my 
starting- points. 

In discussing, therefore, the first of these topics, 
the personality of God, I denote its import in these 
words : " I believe in one God, the Father Al- 
mighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all 
things visible and invisible." This general state- 
ment involves these derivative statements, viz. : The 
universe has a personal Creator, whose nature and 
attributes are infinite, and in virtue of that per- 



The Personality of God. 13 

sonality he is capable of coming into personal 
relations with us, so that he can be to us a Father 
and we can be to him as children. 

Ever since men began to think, they have 
thought about God, that is, they have thought 
about the origin of the world, and how anything 
came to exist. The Oriental philosophies, older, 
perhaps, by thousands of years than our Chris- 
tianity, busied themselves with this chief thought, 
and so did the schools of the Grecian philosophy. 
The cosmogony, the theory of the universe, was 
the one burden of their speculations. In the Mid- 
dle Ages philosophy dealt more with ideas that 
lie this side of those primary ones. Assuming 
the existence of God, they discussed his counsels 
and his plans, and his relations to mankind, and 
might rather be called theologies. At a still more 
recent date there started up again a philoso- 
phy that engrossed almost the whole of German 
thought. It was a speculative system throughout. 
It began its thinking outside of the visible world, 
and its reasoning, drawn from a priori assump- 
tions, was directed not so much to show what is 
the constitution of the universe as to prove what 



14 Lecture First. 



it must be. This, which was called the spiritual 
philosophy, was by a return of the pendulum 
of thought replaced by the materialistic sys- 
tem of our day, which confines itself to the in- 
vestigation of the structure and forces of the 
world about us. 

With this system we have been made sufficiently 
familiar from the presence among us of Huxley 
and Tyndall and Proctor as its spokesmen and 
apostles, and from the writings that occupy the 
counters of the book-stores, the pages of the re- 
views, the columns of the newspapers. It forms 
the staple of our common talk in the parlors and 
the railroad-cars, so that not to know something 
of this system is to betray the lack of finished 
culture. 

The whole long category of philosophical sys- 
tems, comprehending all the great and various 
thinking of the world, may be resolved into two 
systems, one of them pantheism and the other 
materialism, — pantheism beginning with the ab- 
stract and the possible and reasoning forward to 
explain the actual; and the other beginning with 
the actual and tracing it back towards the abstract 



The Personality of God. 15 

and the invisible, but stopping short at both. If 
men think at all on philosophical themes they 
must think from one or the other of these two 
standing-points, so that there can be but two 
essential philosophies. Moreover, among the whole 
long list of philosophical thinkers from seven hun- 
dred years before Christ down to the present hour, 
almost none have been led by their thinking to 
recognize a personal God. Among the ancients 
Anaxagoras was the first to maintain that the 
universe was governed by a personal mind; yet 
he made but little use of the idea in his system 
and he had no important following. 

There was no school of believers in a personal 
Deity. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, did 
indeed so far accept the opinion as to maintain 
that the Deity might be invoked to help the good 
effect of his prescriptions. Besides this I know of 
no other instance in which the pagan philosophy 
came near touching with one of its fingers the re- 
vealed truth of a personal and parental God. The 
two great philosophies were essentially atheistic. 

The system of pantheism is most clearly ex- 
pounded by Spinoza, its modern reviver. Spinoza 



1 6 Lecture First. 



held that there was one eternal something which 
he called " substance." He did not mean material 
substance, nor perhaps anything that we call spirit- 
ual, but it was an existence of some sort, without 
intelligence and without voluntary powers or any 
attributes that could betoken personality. 

It was the nature of this eternal substance to radi- 
ate and evolve itself continually, and in doing so 
it took on visible and tangible shapes and efflor- 
esced into a material universe. This universe, pass- 
ing on through the stages of life and decay, was 
resolved back again to its original matrix to be 
again evolved and decay, and so to chase its own 
life round and round in a never-ending circuit. 

Thus the visible world was only the necessary 
form of this eternal substance, spinning itself out 
from itself and winding itself back into itself. If 
we call that eternal substance God, then God was 
the world itself, and the world itself was God. 

Now Spinoza did call this substance God, and 
since he made that substance to be the all in all of 
everything, his contemporaries called him a " God- 
intoxicated man. " 

This is essential pantheisn according to its ablest 



The Personality of God. IJ 

expositor. We see that it must be godless from 
its want of personality. We can hold no com- 
munion with that eternal substance, because it is 
unintelligent ; we cannot supplicate nor deprecate 
it, for it has no feeling and no will ; we cannot 
worship it, for it has no character. There can be 
no moral distinction, no right, no wrong, because 
everything that happens is but the evolution of 
God. 

As it has no connection with us but in material 
forms, so our nearest approach to it is in the ad- 
miration of nature and in the indulgence of our 
natural desires. I said just now that so much of 
the philosophy as has ever been in the world that 
was not pantheistic was materialistic, and this, 
like the other, denied the personality of God. Al- 
most all the earlier philosophers were of this 
school, and ever since then the fashion of thinking 
has vibrated between pantheism and materialism, 
and each has held an alternate and royal sway in 
the realm of philosophy. 

Materialism teaches that the world is made up 
of two principles of matter and motion, and that 
when the action of motion upon matter is begun, 



1 8 Lecture First. 



matter is evolved, by necessary laws of its being, 
into a universe of varied forms and lives. 

The old materialism did not differ from the 
modern in these fundamental principles. Its phil- 
osophy was the same, although it was far less rich 
in its knowledge of the facts of Nature and of the 
affinities that work out her changes. In this 
knowledge our modern materialistic science is 
affluent beyond all precedent. I remind you only 
of a truism when I say that the rise of our modern 
science has been like a dayspring to the intel- 
lectual and physical life of our century. At her 
word of command our civilization has sprung for- 
ward, at a single bound, farther than in many 
weary generations of the ages gone. By develop- 
ing and utilizing the forces of nature, she has ren- 
dered labor and its products so facile and sure 
that in convenience, comfort, and physical enjoy- 
ment life seems to be concentrated to a focus ; 
and the processes by which her achievements 
have been won are some of them amazing feats of 
intellectual vigor. The nebular hypothesis of the 
formation of the world, that glorious guess of La- 
place, reaching into the realms of conjecture, and 



The Personality of God. 19 

bringing back its far-off conceptions, verified by 
all the known phenomena of the universe, has al- 
most a supernatural look. The suggestion of an 
imponderable ether surrounding and penetrating 
the fabric of the world — a suggestion outside of 
experiment, yet explaining the theory of light and 
perhaps of sound more satisfactorily than any 
former endeavor — is another of the brilliant, pro- 
phetic flashes of scientific thought that almost urge 
the common mind to cry, "What is man? Thou 
hast made him a little, only a little, lower than 
the angels ! " 

Yet these discoveries, being the fruits of hy- 
pothesis and not of strict analysis, may be regarded 
as happy strokes of mental ingenuity rather than 
as legitimate products of science; for it is the sin- 
gular quality and boast of modern science that it 
is purely inductive. Its processes consist in ob- 
serving and analyzing particular phenomena, 
arranging them according to their essential 
likenesses, until the whole of the material world 
is resolved into its elementary forms. In this, the 
legitimate sphere of Science, her processes of gen- 
eralization have developed admirable results. She 



20 Lecture First. 



has assorted all the facts and forces of matter into 
groups, and learned the laws by which the primal 
forms of things are organized into a Kosmos, a 
whole, harmonious world; she has demonstrated 
that all the forms of matter are only one matter, 
that the universal variety of things sprang from one 
primordial germ: but her chief and happiest gen- 
eralization has been in resolving the various ma- 
terial forces into one primal force, of which the rest, 
are, by a high probability, simply derivations or 
modifications. These derived forces are therefore 
congeners, — a sisterhood with one mother, so joined 
in functions that any one of them may replace and 
do the work of either of the others. 

Although the experiments have not yet been 
full enough to demonstrate this fact in its entire 
breadth, yet enough is known to supply a founda- 
tion of what is called " the doctrine of the correla- 
tion of forces." 

That doctrine is described by Prof. Grove, one 
of its earliest expounders, in these words: "The 
various affections of matter which constitute the 
main objects of experimental physics, viz., heat, 
light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and 



The Personality of God. 21 

motion, are all correlative or have a reciprocal de- 
pendence, so that neither, taken abstractedly, can 
be said to be the essential cause of the others, but 
either may produce or be convertible into any of 
the others. Thus heat may mediately or imme- 
diately produce electricity, electricity may produce 
heat, and so of the rest, each merging itself as the 
force it produces becomes developed; and the same 
must hold good of the other forces." 

The parent force of this united family of forces 
would seem, in the opinion of Prof. Grove, to be 
the principle or power of motion ; and so the con- 
clusion is that even as the forms of matter are 
resolvable into one homogeneous matter, so the 
forces of the world are reducible to one unit of 
force. Science has taught us, moreover, that this 
many-sided force operates in all its modifications 
by fixed and ascertainable methods, which she 
calls the laws of the material world. 

This theory seems, indeed, to encounter among 
the phenomena of the world at least one exception 
which refuses to enter into this category of the 
forces. There is another force, unique in charac- 
ter, which stands outside, as a stranger to the fam< 



22 Lecture First. 



ily, if not indeed an antagonist. It is the vital 
force, the principle of organic life throughout the 
world, pervading every organism and maintaining 
each individual existence. It has been attempted, 
but in the opinion of some scientific men hitherto 
unsuccessfully, to bring the vital force into corre- 
lation with the rest. 

There are obvious conditions in which the re- 
lationship fails, or if there be relationship it is not 
that of equality, but rather that of the mastership 
of the vital force; for it has a sort of formative 
power that in its normal state controls the work- 
ing of the other forces, and utilizes them for its 
own purposes, even neutralizing the action, if 
need be, of heat and elasticity and chemical affin- 
ity, so that itself shall be supreme, as it is sin- 
gular, in every organism. And when once the vi- 
tal force has become extinct, it gets no restoring 
or supplementing help from the rest, but rather 
they seize upon the lifeless form and rush it into 
speedy decay, until the once vitalized structure 
is dissolved into its atoms, which can never be re- 
organized until the banished force shall come again 
from its unascertained home and pronounce the 



The Personality of God. 23 

vitalizing word " Live ! " Yet, notwithstanding 
the exceptional character of the vital force, the 
theory of the correlation of forces stands out as a 
masterly demonstration, and all that is necessary 
for the purpose to which I would apply it. 

There is a wondrous satisfaction to the mind, 
looking at the complicated machinery of the ma- 
terial world and the promiscuous movements of its 
seemingly discordant forces, to learn that the dis- 
cord is truly the most beautiful order, and the pro- 
miscuous methods the working of a perfect unity 
of plan. 

These two demonstrations constitute the main 
theoretic results of modern science. They might 
seem at first view to be but insignificant results 
of all the searching thought and labor they have 
cost; but they are elementary facts of the material 
world, and, like other elementary things, they 
contain the possibilities of all things. 

Science, therefore, erects her imposing figure be- 
fore the age, and holds in her lifted hands these 
two demonstrations as her vouchers of authority. 
If this were all she did, not one of us would do 
aught but bow down his mind and do her rever- 



24 Lecture First. 



ence; but in the pride of her great prowess, she 
has sometimes advanced the claim that in ex- 
plaining the system of the material world she has 
disclosed the whole truth of the universe, and has 
declared that there is no knowledge besides that 
which comes from induction, and so Science is 
understood to be at war with that whole class of 
conceptions that lie outside of the material world 
and which are necessarily included in every form 
of religion. This is the reason why science and 
religion are nowadays understood to be in antago- 
nism to one another, specially in the fundamental 
idea of a personal God. I would like to show that 
so far is this from being true, the actual and ad- 
mitted results of scientific research are true indi- 
cators of a personal Deity. As an inductive sys- 
tem, science ought not to be reproached for not 
recognizing a Deity in the world. This is not one 
of the demonstrations that belong to induction. 
Induction is pure observation, and all the faculties 
required in an inductive process are the perceptive 
faculties, and God is not an object of perception. 
It were as great an error for Science to under- 
take to demonstrate a Deity by her processes as it 



The Personality of God. 2$ 

is for her to claim that the perceptive faculties are 
the only ones we have for the discovery of truth, 
while these faculties really belong to the lowest 
tier of man's mental endowments. 

Above the level of the perceptions there is the 
realm of reason, which is the birthplace of all our 
higher powers and conceptions. Our deepest ap- 
prehensions of truth, our loftiest motives, our sub- 
limest reach of thought, spring in a region where 
the perceptive powers have no play and no place. 
They all come from the intuitions of reason, cer- 
tain first principles, which are not so much thoughts 
as they are conditions, without which the mind 
cannot think at all. 

The axioms of mathematics are of this sort, — 
conceptions of the pure reason not evolved by ex- 
periment. The ideas of unity, of cause, of power, 
of time, space, infinitude, are born of the mind it- 
self. The mind cannot live without them. Science 
slurs them as metaphysical and worthless, yet 
Science cannot carry out a demonstration without 
adopting the terminology of metaphysics. She 
speaks of cause and effect, which are metaphysical 
conceptions purely, for science never saw a cause, 



26 Lecture First. 



but only sequence; and of force, yet no one ever 
analyzed a force; and of unity, which she con- 
stantly reaches after but never saw in nature; and 
of space and time and infinitude, ideas which turn 
the perceptive faculties into a mockery. Science 
ought therefore frankly to admit both the reality 
and the authority of reason as a faculty far out- 
reaching the possibilities of perception, and adap- 
ted to explore those higher truths which the per- 
ceptive faculties were not made to learn. 

When we have been brought to the last con- 
clusions of Science, force guided by unity of method 
and law, if we should accept her dictum, that we 
had learned all that can be known of the truth of 
the universe, we should be indeed left to a total 
godlessness of mind. But man's nature refuses to 
be defrauded of its birthright of reason, refuses to 
have its divine prerogative of thinking ignored by 
any system which, with all its claims to respect, 
still denies a thousand times more knowledge than 
it possesses; and so, when Science brings forth her 
demonstrations, Reason at once accepts them, and 
makes them the starting-point for a flight to higher 
truth. 



The Personality of God. 27 

Id this way material Science answers her true 
character as a guide and janitor, leading the mind 
gracefully to the doorway of a higher realm, and 
saving, " I can teach you no more. Enter up now 
among the sublimities of truth. Farewell ! " Rea- 
son begins, then, with the scientific fact of the 
unit of force. And what is force ? What is its 
source and origin? Science has already told us 
that the several forces of the world are not prim- 
itive but derived forces. She tells us that when 
the billiard player propels the ivory balls about 
the table, each ball driving the next, the force is 
not in the ivory. Is it in the wooden cue ? Not 
there. In the bones and muscles of the player's 
arm ? Still not there. These are only the con- 
veyancers of force. Follow up the line of power 
and you find it springing fresh-born from the will 
of the player. This is the ultimate conception of 
the origin of force, the product of volition verified 
as a fact by our own intimate consciousness. No 
proof can go behind this. It is as absolute as the 
consciousness of life itself. The child learns it 
when, putting forth its little arm, it encounters a 
resisting thing, and musters an effort to push it 



28 Lecture First. 



aside. The conscious volition and the conception 
oi power come into birth together in the child's 
mind, and abide together as long as his conscious 
life. Nature teaches us, then, that force is the 
essential product of will; and it follows hence that 
behind the grand unit of force which actuates and 
pervades the world there abides a mighty will 
whose volition is the going forth of the universal 
life. But the question springs up to the causal 
faculty of reason, What is the character of this 
mighty will? Is it a blind, impulsive force, rush- 
ing forth in contortions and spasms of effort, 
without aim or purpose? Science answers this 
question for us in advance, for she discloses through- 
out the universe a single great law or method by 
which all the forces of the world are guided to 
their destinations. Various as those methods seem, 
they act all in perfect harmony, and are all re- 
ducible back to a unit of law co-ordinate with the 
unit of force. And this harmony is not the work 
of chance. Chance is an alien in the realm of 
science. Science shuts her doors against the crazy 
intruder. Order, arrangement, plan, whatsoever 
requires to be developed by mind, must itself be 



The Personality of God. 29 

the product of mind. Whatsoever comes into 
the intelligence must have sprung from intelli- 
gence. To make an intelligible product there must 
be an intelligent producer. The great will, then, is 
not blind nor wild nor fatalistic. It is a clear-eyed 
and wise will, giving out a force that moves 
always by rule and destination. If the universal 
force is the outcome of will, so the universal order 
is the expression of intelligence. And now let us 
remember that both intelligence and will are the 
distinctive attributes of personality. We can think 
of them in no other than a personal relation. If 
this be so, we have been guided by the teachings 
of Science herself to the magnificent conclusion of 
a personal being, super-material in his nature, en- 
dowed with the intelligence and power that up- 
holds the universe. Thus we have reached a firm 
stand-point for fresh exploration. Does this wise 
force comprehend all that belongs to the sovereign 
of creation ? Let Nature respond once more : Thus 
far we have inquired only among the laws of the 
insensible world. Let us try the ascending scale 
of creation, and here at the top we behold the 
human creature, man. He sits as a king, endowed, 



30 Lecture First. 



like the Creator himself, with intelligence and will, 
as if he were not merely a product but rather a 
portrait of the great Creator; not only demonstrat- 
ing but illustrating him, — a sort of type of that 
grand personality to which science has introduced 
us, as the archetype. In this new subject of 
observation we discover a property we did not 
discover in the material world. We find in man 
a moral element which is in truth the surpassing 
dignity of his nature, unique as it is lofty. 

The material world could not teach us of this, 
for matter has no moral sense. As we see it in 
man it seems to sit on his soul as on a throne, the 
imperial faculty of his nature. True, it is imper- 
feet, with spots upon its face and with its power 
broken by many a hard strain, but the ideal 
character of man's moral nature is glorious. Its 
conceptions mount up to perfection, its regal voice 
has the power of thunder: and yet it is remarkable 
that, grand as it is, it always recognizes a moral 
sovereignty above itself, to which it bows down, 
of which it stands in awe. If man is by nature a 
moral being, and if the Creator cannot be inferior 
to his own work, then the Creator, too, is a moral 



The Personality of God. 31 

being. The intuition of reason, the causative 
faculty, grasps this fresh discovery, and transfers 
the conception from the typical creature to the 
archetypal Creator, and then the presence stands 
before us in its completeness. Look at it, then, 
as nature and reason have revealed him, — a super- 
natural personage, mighty, wise, and good, worthy 
to be God. Induction has guided us to the limits 
of her demonstrations, the intuitive reason has led 
those demonstrations to the point of assurance. 
But, still with this assurance of the personal Crea- 
tor, a question arises, How great is he ? Is he 
great enough to be the finality of my peace and 

In other words, although we have found a being 
with power enough to create the world, with 
wisdom enough to order it, and with enough of 
moral goodness to govern it justly and kindly, yet 
how far do these qualities reach ? I may be satis- 
fied to say with the creed, " I believe in the 
Creator of heaven and earth''; but can I believe 
that his power is unlimited so that I can say, 
"Almighty"? I may say I believe in God, but 
can I say that his moral goodness is without possi- 



32 Lecture First. 



ble deduction, so that I can call him the only God? 
And Reason answers her own question. Her in- 
tuitions disclose the transcendental truths of time 
and space and infinitude and unity as the proper- 
ties of existence, and as soon as the intuition of 
causality has revealed the personal first cause, the 
other intuitions combine to clothe the conception 
with the necessary attributes of infinity. The 
first cause must be eternal. If his is a necessary 
existence he must exist alone, since there cannot 
be two necessary existences; and for the same 
reason he must exist everywhere; and since his 
attributes must be as necessary as his existence, 
they, too, must be infinite, his power absolute, his 
knowledge taking in the past, the present, and 
the possible, his moral goodness utterly perfect. 
But some may say, " How does reason teach us 
all this of the Creator, since reason cannot con- 
ceive of infinitude in any form ? " If it is meant 
that we cannot comprehend the infinite as to its 
modes, it is most true; but if it means that we 
cannot conceive of it as a fact, it is most fallacious, 
for it is impossible to conceive of the opposite. 
We cannot conceive of space and duration as 



The Personality of God. 33 

necessarily limited. Assign any boundary you 
please, count the miles by millions, billions, and tril- 
lions, at each step, and count for years, and when 
you reach the boundary, and look out beyond, 
what do you see ? Either space or nothing, infin- 
ite space or infinite nothing, but still the infinite. 
And so with duration as with space. Reason will 
admit of no terminus. She conceives of the infin- 
ite and goes out after it forever. Her home is 
infinitude, and when she finds her God and shows 
him to us, He is the embodiment of it; He is 
clothed with it as with a garment, and all his 
attributes are only different expressions of infini- 
tude. So far then our best-taught reason accepts 
the creed of God almighty, maker of all things 
visible and invisible, — accepts this creed so com- 
pletely that if we admit a personal deity at all we 
cannot conceive of him as anything less than 
infinite. But the Christian creed has added an- 
other title, — " Father." Do the conclusions we 
have reached justify the addition ? I think so. 

If God is indeed the moral archetype of his 
creature man, a moral personality with infinitude 
added, then every moral and affectionate perfec- 



34 Lecture First. 



tion may be affirmed of him. If he is infinitely 
righteous, he will not be unjust to his moral crea- 
ture; if he is good in the same measure, he will 
do whatsoever is kind and gracious, strong to help 
man's weakness, wise to correct and remedy his 
foolishness, kind and compassionate, not only to 
relieve his wants, but to forecast the human need, 
both of body and soul, and to establish a prov- 
idence that shall run parallel with both. In a 
word, the idea of the divine fatherhood acknowl 
edges a revelation to man as a necessary outcome 
of his justice and his goodness. It admits the per- 
fect reasonableness of miracles; it enforces the 
power and worth of prayer. All the needs of the 
conscience, the heart, the soul of man are so many 
specific conclusions that God's fatherhood will 
prove itself true. In contemplating these needs 
we get a better view of that fatherhood than we 
could in the clear, cool heights where our thoughts 
have been just now ranging. 

Our souls grasp it more closely when we bring 
it down from that high light which is the life of 
reason, and let it in among the murky things of 
life, to walk with us over the uneven earth, and 



The Personality of God. 35 

enter our homes, where there are cares and trials 
and fears and sorrows. For the soul must have 
her creed. Our reason may rejoice to claim the 
personality of God as a demonstrated truth, but 
the soul craves the fatherhood; she is not satisfied 
to say, I believe in an Almighty Creator of heaven 
and earth. She marks the missing title, " Father," 
and she asks with anguish, Is there no love, 
no care, no nurture with the Almighty for his 
children ? 

If this big question of the soul were not met to 
the full, what a grim chimera would our life be, 
what a palace of ice the demonstration of a God ! 

The soul can answer her own longings by in- 
terpreting her own consciousness. 

If I am in his image he will not reject me. He 
has given me a longing after a perfect bliss that 
is nowhere else but with him. He teaches me by 
my earthly loves that there must be infinite loveli- 
ness in my God. Nay, the scientific law of adapt- 
ation beautifully foreshows that the affinity of the 
human with the Divine, will be a domestic one, 
the harmony of heaven and earth, a perfect union. 
In this let the soul rest, interpreting God by itself. 



36 Lecture First. 



When the sense of sonship aspires after God, it is 
because the fatherhood is bending down to lift the 
soul to itself. When the soul glows with love and 
trust it is the reflex of the Father's tenderness 
beaming down upon it. 

So God's Fatherhood comes into the life of man, 
walks with him, talks with him, shines into his 
darkness, tempers his heats, warms his coldness, 
and shields him with his right arm, gives peace to 
die with, triumph over the grave, and an open 
heaven where reason, soul, and conscience shall 
see the personal God, and say, Abba Father, I am 
satisfied. Man's destiny blooms into bliss from 
this root of faith, — I believe in God the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all 
things visible and invisible. 



LECTURE II. 



THE TEI-PERSONALITT OP GOD. 



LECTUEE II. 

THE TRI-PEKSONALITY OF GOD. 

MY subject to-night is " The Doctrine of the 
Trinity." I well know the effect of such 
an announcement upon very many ears, — a dry, 
abstract, metaphysical theme, worn worse than 
threadbare by the collisions of controversy through 
all the ages ; an unpractical theme besides, and not 
a power in the spiritual life begetting freshness 
and fruits. Abstract it is, no doubt, and deep and 
subtle in its suggestions, for it searches the skies 
and beholds God. It carries the mysterious look 
of that half-transparent haze that we sometimes 
see in the summer firmament, tinged with the mel- 
low glory of the midday sun and suggesting an 
infinite depth of glory beyond : but we can hardly 
say it is an unpractical theme; we cannot say so 

39 



40 Lecture Second. 



of any truth or point of faith which has concen- 
tred to itself, as this has, all the other beliefs of 
the Christian creed from the first year of grace 
until now. 

Nothing can be more striking than the supremely 
affectionate tenacity with which the generations 
of Christians have clung to this great doctrine as 
a sort of " be all and end all " of the universal 
faith. 

While the many minds of the many men have 
run into diversity on the other points of belief and 
some into wide tangents of error, there have been 
very few who believed in Christianity at all who 
have broken the tether that held them heart and 
soul to this magnetic centre of the faith. 

I do not mean to say that even this doctrine has 
not been perverted and even denied. Speculative 
and rationalizing minds have sometimes so ex- 
plained it as to explain it away, and once for many 
years, in the Gothic period of the Roman empire, an 
antagonistic doctrine did so prevail as to threaten 
fatally this germ-power of the faith. The invading 
barbarians, in accepting from their conquered foes 
their religious faith, received it in the form most 



The Tri- Personality of God. 41 

nearly level with their mental crudeness, and as 
it was said, " The church awoke one morning and 
found itself Arian." But even this could not last. 
The true kingdom of God, which is always within, 
was stronger than the kingdom of the world. The 
indwelling Christ in the hearts of believers was a 
restorative power that by degrees purged out the 
malaria from the blood and body of the church, 
and brought back the vigor of her faith, till her 
strong reclaim established once more the belief 
of the Divine Trinity as the cardinal truth of 
the Christian system. This great defection, there- 
fore does not any more than the smaller ones dis- 
credit or qualify the statement that the doctrine of 
the Trinity has been the uniform holding of the 
church. They have each and all been local and 
transient, serving only as occasions to bring out 
into fresh assertion the primitive truth, which 
might else have lost its brightness and edge. 

It may be interesting, I have thought, to track 
the history of this doctrine, and to note the causes 
and manner of its development. Development, 
I say, not in the scientific sense of evolution, start- 
ing from an indifferent atom and becoming trans- 



42 Lecture Second. 



formed into all possible shapes; the development 
rather of a living thing, a plant in whose seed is 
the potential life of stalk and foliage and fruit, ma- 
turing each in its turn as the months go by, first the 
blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
ear. 

The development of Divine truth is such as 
never changes its seminal character, but adapts 
itself with enlargements to suit the ever-new ex- 
igencies in the lives of men and the progress of soci- 
ety. We see this beautifully exhibited in the faith 
of the early church. There was no logical statement 
of the doctrine of the Trinity. Those early be- 
lievers were not used to scientific terms or 
systematic ideas. Their simple faith rested in the 
leadership and lordship of Jesus Christ. They 
had accepted him as the all in all of their soul's 
life and hope. They had consecrated their whole 
selves to him, Jiving and dying. Their faith in 
God was not transferred to, but centred in his Son. 
God was hypostasized to their minds in the person 
of the Christ; for in the revelation of the Gospel 
God had so set forth his Son as the author of their 
salvation, planted him so in the forefront of the 



The Tri- Personality of God. 43 

great redeeming work, that when they looked for 
a redeemer they saw only him ; when their forgiven 
souls would embrace their deliverer, they clasped 
the knees of Christ; when they dedicated their re- 
stored and grateful hearts to him to whom they 
owed so much, it took the form of loyal love and 
supreme covenanted allegiance to the personal 
Jesus. They lived for him, they died in him, and 
their heavenly hope terminated in an everlasting 
union with him. Jesus Christ was the author not 
only, but the finisher of their faith. It was not 
idolatry, for they knew that God was in Christ, 
reconciling them to himself; and knowing this, 
they were jealous of any statement that might in- 
vade his dignity or abate the assurance of their 
own trust and hope. 

So pre-eminent was this belief in the divinity of 
Christ among the early Christians, that the first 
error that enunciated itself was the denial of his 
humanity, which was thought to derogate from 
his divinity, maintaining that the person of Jesus 
was but a phantasm, a mere form, in which God 
disguised himself when he came down to save the 
world. The error was repressed, not so much by 



44 Lecture Second. 



speculative reasoning as by the Christian con- 
sciousness of the church, the divine common-sense, 
which having been begotten with the new life of 
Christ in the soul, worked like an inspiration or an 
instinct to recognize the truth and to detect in the 
atmosphere of thought the slightest taint of error 
upon a theme so vital and absorbing as the divinely 
human person of their Lord. And this state of 
things lasted through several generations. 

The intellectual strength of the church, such as 
it was, was mainly engaged in vindicating her 
truths against the assaults of Jews and Pagans, 
and during this, the apologetic period of her his- 
tory, there were few speculations within the 
church touching the doctrines of the faith. Still, 
in all this period, although there was small occa- 
sion for the church to formulate her doctrines in 
scientific terms, or to define them with logical 
accuracy, there was evidence enough of the 
strength and constancy of her faith in the hymns 
and liturgies brought down from the earliest 
periods, and universally used. Hymns and litur- 
gies they were, surcharged with the fragrance of 
a piety that centred its devoutest worship on the 



The Tri- Personality of God. 45 

divine personality of Christ. And then again 
there was the surpassing proof of suffering. If 
the early church gave sometimes only an equivocal 
testimony to Christ in the party-colored lives of 
her members, gathered, as they were, from among 
the various peoples of the empire, with the crust of 
heathen habits not yet sloughed off from their 
crude piety ; if they were not all versed in the cas- 
uistry of a daily godliness, — they were at least 
clear and stanch enough in their grand holding of 
Christ to give up their lives rather than to deny him. 
The shortcomings in little duties might throw a 
suspicion upon their reverence for their Lord's pre- 
cepts, but their endurance unto martyrdom left no 
question of their surpassing love of his person and 
their supreme trust in his divine salvation. 

Martyrdom, therefore, was the voice of the 
church's faith in the divinity of Christ. The 
saintly blood that saturated the arena, and flowed 
in the gutters of the amphitheatre, was a demon- 
stration of the primitive creed that could have 
borrowed nothing of clearness or emphasis from 
any argument. The logic of dying carried not 
only an assertion of the church's faith, but a proof 



46 Lecture Second. 



of its truth and power that gained thousands of 
converts to the divinity of Christ. But by and by, 
as the church grew towards a settled and secure 
condition, the minds of men turned more towards 
the analysis of the creed. It was then only a 
simple formula, probably like the Apostles' Creed 
as we now have it, if it was not indeed the same, 
containing nothing more than a recital of facts 
from the narrative of the Bible. Yet each fact was 
the investment of a truth ; each historic statement 
bore within itself a divine meaning ; and the minds 
of men set themselves to eliminate that meaning, 
and to formulate it in some scientific statement. 
Then began the intellectual gladiatorship, which 
is always stirred by thinking upon deep and high 
themes. The apologetic period passed into the 
dogmatic. The faith that had hitherto been a 
warm instinct, finding its sufficient reinforcement 
in the spiritual needs of a driven and persecuted 
church, was now called upon to justify itself at 
the tribunal of the reasoning powers. The main 
controversy was touching the divinity of Christ. 
The doctrine of the Holy Ghost, his personality 
and agency, was not as yet impugned; neither was 



The Tri- Personality of God. 47 

it necessary to defend it as a part of the doctrine 
of the Trinity. For if it could be established that 
the person of the Son was coequal and coeternal 
with the person of the Father, then there would 
be proved a dual oneness in the Godhead that 
silenced the speculative objectors to the Trinity. 
Because if the oneness of the Godhead admits of a 
plurality of persons, it makes no difference in the 
reason of things whether that plurality be two 
or three. When the rational difficulty of any 
plurality at all is met and answered, the question, 
" How many does that plurality embrace ? " is a 
question for revelation alone to determine. 

The controversy gathered itself, therefore, ex- 
clusively about the question of the proper and 
personal divinity of Christ. It was a warfare of 
ingenious and subtile reasoning on both sides. 
The profoundest logic and the keenest metaphysi- 
cal distinctions were the weapons of this ethereal 
contest, which assumed four distinct aspects an- 
swering to as many distinct opinions touching 
the nature and person of Christ. The first 
opinion denied his proper divinity; the second 
denied his possession of a human soul, and main- 



48 Lecture Second. 



tained that God took the place of* the soul in the 
person of Christ; the third affirmed that there were 
two distinct persons in Christ, divine and human; 
and the fourth mingled the two natures of Christ 
into one. These four errors were condemned by 
the church, and each error was answered, as 
Hooker says, by a single word. The first, which 
denied that Christ was God, is answered by the 
word " truly." The second, that denied to Christ 
a perfect humanity from the absence of a human 
soul, is met by the word " perfectly." The third, 
that divided his person into two, by the adverb " in- 
divisibly," and the fourth which confounded the two 
natures by blending them in one, was answered by 
another adverb, "distinctly." "Truly," "perfectly," 
" indivisibly," " distinctly," that is, truly God, per- 
fectly man, of one indivisible personality, and of 
two distinct natures. These four adverbs denote, 
therefore, the four aspects of the doctrine which, 
as the sides of a square, enclose the great truth 
impregnably. Every assault upon the doctrine 
must make its approach upon one or another of 
these four sides, which thus complete the state- 
ment of the doctrine and exhaust the several forms 



The Tri- Personality of God. 49 

of objection. This quadrilateral intrenchment of 
the truth was accomplished by the four General 
Councils of the church, each pronouncing upon one 
or another of the four chief heresies. In those 
councils the total doctrine of the Trinity, involv- 
ing the distinct personalities of the Father, the 
Son, and the Holy Ghost joined together in the 
substantive unity of the divine nature, was so for- 
mulated by precise logical terms, sharp-lined and 
clear, that the crystalline formation has lost no 
fraction of its meaning to this day nor a scintilla 
of its bright truth. Answering the speculations 
of the best reason of man with the deductions of 
the most rational logic, it left no careless loop for 
ingenuity to hang a doubt on. 

As we trace the light of this doctrine back 
through the ages of faith till we come to the 
period of its first systematic statement, it stands 
out from the background of revelation, condensing 
the diffusive truth into one luminous body, the 
fixed exposition of the mind of God. 

Thus far, you will observe, I have not entered 
into the Scriptural evidence of this great doctrine. 
The collection of texts would be too long a pro- 



50 Lecture Second. 



cess for a single lecture. Yet I cannot help ask- 
ing you to think a little of a single text, which 
seems to me a sort of focal statement of the 
doctrine. I refer to the baptismal formula drawn 
from Christ's last commission to his apostles: "Go 
ye, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name 
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost." 

Remembering the occasion of these words, they 
bear a very peculiar significance. They were the 
ministerial charter of authority and the guide-book 
of ministerial responsibility. What Christ said to 
his disciples in his parting words must bear a 
weighty meaning. As baptismal words, they in- 
stitute the sacrament of initiation into his church. 
Chiselled on the portico of the Christian temple, their 
meaning must be the alphabetical truth of his 
religion. Every man or woman or child must 
adopt these words as the confession of his faith, — 
" Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 

Let us see what truth is garnered up into this 
formula of words. And first examine the formula 
itself as a simple question of grammatical con- 
struction, " In the name of the Father and of the 



The Tr i- Personality of God. 51 

Son and of the Holy Ghost." Here is a noun in 
the singular number, the word, " name," and then 
there are three different titles denoting as many- 
distinct personalities; and the word "name" in 
the singular is made to comprehend the three 
several titles as if they were together summed up 
in that one name. The unit and the triplet are 
identical in force and value. Now this relation is 
not changed when we turn the abstraction into a 
personality; as the comprehensive name which 
takes in the three titles is the name of God, so the 
three personalities denoted by the titles are per- 
sonalities of God, and thus the God of our baptism 
is a triune Jehovah. But leaving the grammati- 
cal sense of the baptismal formula, let us see what 
light is shed upon our subject by the nature and 
use of the baptism itself. 

Baptism is the form of a covenant between the 
two parties, God and man, in which each party 
assumes a distinct responsibility and obligation. 
On the part of God, it is the obligation of grace 
and salvation. On the part of man, it is self-con- 
secration and obedience. We may look at it both 
on its divine and the human side. The interpre- 



52 Lecture Second. 

tation of its divine side is this : all the blessing of 
the covenant, forgiveness of sin, regeneration of 
the soul, the indwelling of God, spiritual strength 
and victory to be crowned in Heaven. These are 
the pledged gifts of baptism to every faithful re- 
ceiver. But we ask, " In whose name, on what 
authority, are these matchless promises made ? " 
In the one name, by the one authority, of the 
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But 
these gifts are all divine, the bestowment of God 
alone. It cannot be, then, that either of the cov- 
enanting persons is less than divine. The Son 
cannot be a creature born in time, if he bestows 
creative and eternal gifts. The Hoty Ghost must 
be more than an influence, a breath, an imperson- 
ality, if it can work the most illustrious works of 
God. 

And so I infer that since the covenant is one 
and the authority one, and since the covenanting 
powers must be personal, there must be a sense in 
which the distinct personalities must be joined in 
one substance of unity. The God of baptism must 
be triune. 

Look now at the human side of the baptismal 



The Tri- Personality of God. 53 

sacrament. The believing person is baptized in 
the one name. To him who bears that name he 
makes confession of his guilt, proclaims the grat- 
itude of forgiveness. Him he avouches to be 
henceforward the sovereign of his heart and life; 
renouncing all other conflicting loves, all repug- 
nant service, all other worship, he dedicates himself 
to his acceptance. 

Lost, but redeemed by Him, guilty, but by Him 
forgiven, sinful in grain, but now by Him regen- 
erated, he brings his whole rescued nature and 
lays it on the altar consecrated to the one great 
baptismal name, and that name Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost. And the same importunate question 
comes round to the human side, Who are Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost ? Am I to pay a sovereign 
and equal loyalty to the eternal Father, to a crea- 
ture, and to a breath, an influence, the shadow of a 
shade? Is my faith to be distributed among 
beings of such different make and nature, and my 
supremest love and adoration divided and degrad- 
ed ? Is this what I mean in my baptism ? It were 
idolatry to do so. If I must render to the three 
persons a divine consecration, then those three 



54 Lecture Second. 



must be alike divine. If I must bow to them alike 
under one sacred name, there must be a sense in 
which the three are one, and the God of my bap- 
tism is triune. I do not see why the force of this 
reasoning is not conclusive, and interpreting the 
baptismal text by its grammatical structure and 
its religious purpose, it seems to contain in itself 
the necessary recognition of the doctrine of the 
Trinity, — three distinct personalities joined with 
equal power and glory in one essential nature of 
Godhead. 

This is the substance of the doctrine as it was 
adjusted and set forth by the four General Coun- 
cils, in refutation of all the opposing theories that 
had come into birth during two centuries of the 
church's life. And this declaration seems to have 
been accepted as a finality and treasured as a 
priceless legacy by all the Christian generations 
since. It has entered into the creed of every con- 
siderable organization of Christians to this day. 
The Eastern and the Western churches, and every 
Protestant church that has embodied its faith in a 
symbol, have clung to the doctrine as the spinal 
column of the whole body of Christian belief, upon 



The Tri- Personality of God. 55 

which depended the value and vigor of every other 
tenet. In all this lapse of time none of the errors 
that teased the early church have recovered from 
the buffet of the four councils, except two, the 
Arian and the Sabellian theories. These two, be- 
ing less speculative than the rest, more level to the 
common apprehension of men, would hold their 
grasp the longest, and seize the first occasion of 
religious thinking to cast aside their grave-clothes 
and come forth in a resurrection form. 

The Arian heresy consisted in the absolute de- 
nial of the deity of Christ. And although the ut- 
most that Arius ever affirmed was that there was 
a period when the Son of God was not, yet the 
sensitive perceptions of the early Christians dis- 
cerned quickly the falsity and mischief that were 
disguised in this gentle negation, and immediately 
rose in conflict. The controversy was virulent and 
widely spread. The Church was shaken by it. 
The Arian opinion was so simple that it might 
easily satisfy the minds of the common and uncul- 
tured class, who were inapt and impatient at sub- 
tile distinctions of thought, and so rational as to 
suit that other class, always to be found in cultivated 



56 Lecture Second. 



society, whose chief worship is paid to the sover- 
eignty of intellect, who would bring divine truth 
within the jurisdiction of reason, and summon even 
the deep things of God to justify themselves at the 
bar of common-sense. Arianism, therefore, was a 
formidable power of error, which had to be met 
and refuted by the gathered authority of the 
church. 

The first General Council, assembled at Nicea in 
a. d. 325, gave such point-blank denial to the Arian 
position as to shut it out forever from the citadel 
of the Catholic faith. 

" God of God, light of light, very God of very 
God, begotten not made, being of one substance 
with the Father," were words of august authority, 
that uttered the death-warrant of Arianism within 
the church. 

And although it has reappeared again and again 
in its own form and in the derived and cognate 
forms of Semiarianism, Unitarianism, and human- 
itarianism, it has always been as an assailant from 
the outside, and has never ventured to claim the 
sanction of Catholic approval; so that while it may 
claim among its adherents characters as exalted 



The Tri-Persotiality of God. 57 

and lives as pure as that of Arius himself, with 
beliefs so reverent and trustful as to challenge our 
highest respect, yet its extreme indulgence of 
reason has begotten much lower forms of belief, 
until we can count the steps in the ladder of de- 
clension, from the highest form of Arian belief 
down to the disbelief of any supernatural element 
in the Bible, a total denial of its inspiration, claim- 
ing the religion of the absolute as the ultimate 
reach of reason and the only true faith for mankind. 
But besides the Arian error, I mentioned the 
Sabellian as having survived the period of the 
councils, and reappearing in modern forms. 

The error of Sabellius differed from that of Ari- 
us by a whole diameter; for while Arius could not 
but hold the personality of the Son of God, since 
he believed him to be a creature, Sabellius, on the 
other hand, maintained his divinity and denied his 
distinct personality. He held that God subsisted 
only in one personality, and that in his relations 
with man he acted in three distinct lines or func- 
tions or methods, and in each of these functions or 
methods he assumed a distinct and descriptive 
title. As the supreme administrator of the world 



58 Lecture Second. 

he bore the title of Father; whenever he would 
make manifestations of himself to man he assumed 
the name of Son ; and whenever he would bring 
his power to bear in the way of efficient agency 
upon man's life and soul, he was called the Holy 
Ghost. God the sovereign, enthroned amidst the 
reserve of his majesty, God the manifester, coming 
into incarnation, and God the regenerator and 
sanctifier of the human soul, were only three dis- 
tinct aspects of the one personality of God. There 
were others, both before and after Sabellius, who 
held opinions differing only slightly from his, and 
of whom, therefore, he is a fair representative. It 
is easy to see how widely and easily his doctrines 
would find acceptance in the church. By recog- 
nizing the full divinity of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost, he satisfied the hearts of that devout multi- 
tude whose faith and love had centred on a Saviour 
God, but whose reasoning powers were untrained 
in logical distinctions. Their hearts and souls had 
taught them by a delighted experience of his grace 
that their Christ was divine, and they had not 
enough of dialectic skill and acumen to trace out 
the vicious consequence of denving his separate 



The Tri- Personality of God. 59 

personality. Yet it requires no long thought to 
discover the sinister bearing of this view upon the 
doctrine of Christ's atonement. 

It seems plain that if the Son of God be only one 
aspect of the Father's person, the atonement for 
human guilt was made by the Father to himself, 
— an incongruity that carries its own refutation. 
There could be, then, no atonement in its sense of 
substitution, or in any sense beyond that of 
moral suasion or a pure example or a pathetic 
martyrdom. There could be no high-priestly in- 
tercession at the mercy-seat above for the strug- 
gling souls of the redemption. 

The utmost of the work of Christ would be to 
tell mankind that he was their Father, who had 
come down to assure them of his fatherhood, that 
he loved them like a father, pitied their moral 
weakness, and would by no means judge them se- 
verely if they would try to do as he should tell 
them. There is not enough in a doctrine like this 
to meet the wants of a soul profoundly in earnest, 
looking first at its own low proclivities, and then 
looking at God in the white splendor of his holi- 
ness, a soul possessed by a conscious guiltiness 



6o Lecture Second. 



that condemns itself, and insists on being pun- 
ished. 

While, therefore, the doctrine of Arius evacu- 
ated the Atonement of its value, Christ being only 
a creature, the doctrine of Sabellius stripped it of 
its meaning and resolved it into only a method of 
moral influence. This theory did not die with the 
mob of errors to which the councils gave the death- 
blow, but its reproductive power lived along with 
that of Arius, a seed-power, torpid for a while, like 
the grains of wheat in the cerements of an Egyp- 
tian mummy, waiting only for an opening occasion 
to sprout and bear fruit. 

Accordingly, in modern times, Sabellianism has 
had a fresh birth; first, in Germany, where it met 
the crazy rationalism of the times and grafted its 
philosophy upon the religion of the Bible. It was 
not difficult to do so, for the idea of some sort of 
trinity in the Godhead was not strange to the old 
philosophies. Both the Hindoo and the Platonic 
trinities had entered as elements into the ancient 
systems of thought, and were, therefore, respect- 
able from their pedigree. Thus Sabellianism had 
an authentic philosophical footing, which kept it 



The Tri- Personality of God. 61 

from being despised ; and inasmuch as it set forth 
only a modal Trinity and avoided the puzzling 
dogma of three persons joined in one substance of 
nature, its presentment of God had a look no 
worse than of a religious philosophy, that is, a phil- 
osophy that had not so much of religion as to 
spoil it. 

From Germany, the system has crossed the 
water to England and thence to America, where 
it lives a popular and advancing life, suiting itself 
to the class of clerical minds who sympathize with 
the progressive spirit of the age, and whose young 
ambition is tinged with intellectuality. The fol- 
lowers of Sabellius do indeed maintain that their 
doctrine is not forbidden by the church. They 
claim that the dogmatic teaching of the Nicene 
creed does not bar them out from the fold of the 
Orthodox faith, because, while that creed exhausts 
the very life-blood of Arianism in proclaiming the 
full divinity of the Son of God, it has no clause 
that asserts his separate personality. Hence its 
doctrine of a modal Trinity is not a heresy. This 
would seem to be at first view a plausible claim. 
It is not until we refer to the Athanasian creed 



62 Lecture Second. 



that Sabellianism meets with an explicit rebuke. 
In that creed, the most perfect model of dogmatic 
statement that the world has ever seen, the doc- 
trine of the tri-personality of the Godhead is stated 
in terms so full and with such discrimination of 
thought as seem to render a mistake impossible. 
Its form is not only inclusive, but exclusive as 
well. Its declarations are antithetical, balanced 
by an affirmation on one hand and a negation on 
the other; not only asserting the doctrine but de- 
nying in terms its opposite; showing both what it 
means and what it does not mean at a single 
glance. 

That Creed, therefore, has ever been held to be 
the best fortified bulwark of the Faith, and, in 
every church that receives it as authority, the Sa- 
bellian belief must be content to hold the place of 
a tolerated error. Our own Church, by declining 
to admit it as one of her standards, has left a some- 
what open field for the followers of Sabellius to 
disport their unshackled thoughts. If their theory 
be not arrested and rebuked by other recognitions 
of the Trinity in the devotional and liturgical ex 
pressions of the Church, there would seem to be 



The Tri- Personality of God. 63 

nothing in the logical construction of her creeds 
to convict the other doctrine as illegitimate. 

The objections in our day to the doctrine of the 
Trinity are somewhat different from those of the 
early times, because they spring from psychologi- 
cal reasoning, a species of thinking unknown to 
their philosophies. From this source comes the 
main objection that the doctrine of the tri-person- 
ality of God is contradicted by the essential idea 
of personality, and is therefore necessarily incon- 
ceivable and false. The essence of personality, it 
is said, is self-consciousness, the consciousness of 
being itself and not another; its function is to cre- 
ate the sense of separateness and individuality and 
the exclusion of all other individualities. 

Now, the doctrine of tri-personality contradicts 
this elementary self-consciousness; it asserts that 
the three personalities are one personality, which 
is to declare that three units are one and the same 
unit, which is absurd. If we reply that the doc- 
trine does not take the shape of saying three per- 
sons in one person, but three persons in one Divine 
nature, then the objector asks, What is that Divine 
nature ? Is it too a personality ? If so, there are 



64 Lecture Second. 

four personalities, not three only ; and if it be not 
a personality, but only a nature, an unknown 
something, then the three persons are independent 
beings and the system is a Tritheism. What shall 
we say to this keen and trenchant objection, that 
pierces to the heart of the doctrine and cuts in 
twain the silver cord of its vitality? 

As the objection is an aggressive one, the answer 
needs be only defensive. As it makes a positive 
charge of inconceivability and necessary absurdity, 
the charge is sufficiently repelled and the doctrine 
vindicated by a negative. Does the idea of three 
distinct personal consciousnesses conflict fatally 
with the idea of the unity of those personalities in 
one nature ? Can any way be shown to the eye 
of reason in which they may conceivably be joined 
in a unity of essence without the logical crea- 
tion of a fourth personal consciousness? In ad- 
vance of further argument, let me say that per- 
haps our conclusion may depend somewhat upon 
the direction in which our minds address the 
subject. 

When the idea of the Trinity is propounded as a 
philosophical theme, we naturally begin our think- 



The Tri- Personality of God. 65 

ing at the nearest terminus of thought, and reason 
back to the beginning. We think first of the sev- 
eral personalities, and then proceed to join the 
severalities into unity, which, after all, is only an 
aggregation of units, to which we find it difficult 
to ascribe any subsistence of its own. The connec- 
tion seems arbitrary and artificial, a union rather 
than a unity. The doctrine thus takes on the 
look of tritheism, — the three personalities joined 
by affinity, and not by constitutional and essential 
oneness. Supposing, however, that we begin to 
think at the remoter terminus, and let the concep- 
tion be of the Godhead as eternally subsisting in 
a triple form, not compounded of three personal- 
ities, but as being never anything else than three. 
The unity does not then appear as a junction of 
separate subsistences, but its very constitution and 
essence is that of a triple subsistence, — an idea 
which seems to me not beyond the reach of ration- 
al conception. If there be a difficulty of think- 
ing this, is not the difficulty one of ignorance 
rather than of reason, the same that besets all 
our thoughts of the Divine subsistence, or of 
any other being or thing, which makes even a 



66 Lecture Second. 



blade of grass an enigma, and the whole world 
a huge, solemn mystery ? 

But now let us try to meet distinctly the ob- 
jection that if there be, besides the three per- 
sonal consciousnesses, another consciousness of the 
Divine nature itself, then the four consciousnesses 
are equivalent to four Gods and not three in one. 
As the whole objection grounds itself in our human 
psychology, let us get our reply from the same 
source and take our human consciousness as the 
basis of thought. 

Mankind subsists to-day as twelve hundred 
millions of distinct personalities, each personality 
having its distinct consciousness of being itself and 
not another; yet all these personalities spring from 
the one ground of nature which we call humanity, 
binding those personalities together in a character- 
istic unity which distinguishes them from all other 
natures, from brute to angelic. 

Each one of the personalities contains the 
whole power and character of human nature as 
truly and essentially as if it were the only human 
being in existence. Human nature would not be 
different, would not be less, if there were only one 



The Tri- Personality of God. 67 

person to represent it. The plurality of persons, 
therefore, does not destroy the unity of nature. 
This will of course be easily admitted, but it will 
probably be asked, " Is there any consciousness in 
this nature itself? the consciousness namely among 
the several persons of being joined together by 
this common bond ? " " Is there mingled with the 
personal consciousness, which is the consciousness 
of separateness, another consciousness, which is 
the consciousness of unity ? " I think there is. 
Else what is the meaning of the universal sense of 
brotherhood ? What is that touch of nature that 
makes the whole world kin ? What is that native 
sympathy that we feel for the trials and sorrows of 
mankind, though far away ? Why do our hearts sink 
at their debasement or our blood boil at their wrongs? 
Why does any distressed man make appeal with a 
sort of confidence to the generic feelings of human 
nature? Why does the skilful orator address 
himself so surely to those generic feelings to gain 
his cause ? Why is it that companions find them- 
selves so often interpreting each other's silent 
feelings, anticipating each other's wishes, or utter- 
ing at the same moment precisely the same senti- 



68 Lecture Second. 



ments ? Does not this world-known fact imply an 
underlying consciousness of unity perfectly com- 
patible with the individual consciousness of per- 
sonality ? If so, it seems to me we have analogy 
enough to warrant the idea of a similar constitu- 
tion of the Divine nature. 

Supposing only the difference of degree between 
man and God; supposing these facts of our life to 
be translated into the ineffable conditions of God's 
life; supposing, in a word, that man, made in the 
image of God, is a type, no matter how lame and 
feeble, of the great archetype of infinitude, may 
we not suppose that the Divine nature may still 
be distributed into personalities without losing its 
deity, and at the same time may hold in itself a 
consciousness of itself, which is incorporated with 
the consciousness of each personality, pervading 
each so intimately that with each consciousness 
of separateness there will be blended the insepar- 
able and intense consciousness of unity ? This 
supposition seems to me perfectly conceivable and 
answering the essential requirements of the doc- 
trine of the Trinity; and if only conceivable, it 
meets the objection we are dealing with of impos- 



The Tn- Personality of God. 6g 

sibility and contradiction. If conceivable, it is not 
irrational, and if not irrational it may be true. 
Thus, then, I think the doctrine stands secure from 
the assaults of human reason, even as, by the con- 
fessions of the universal church, it is the fixed 
truth of revelation. It justifies itself to our ac- 
ceptance in that not only does the earnest disciple 
cling to it with his heart, and not only the pro- 
longed strain of Christian consciousness has made 
this truth, with its dependent truths, the burden 
of its teaching and its song, but in that our sov- 
ereign reason can muster no effective weapons 
against it, but, standing face to face with the pos- 
sibility, can only adore the glory of its mystery in 
the divine Three in One. And this is no skeleton 
truth : it is clothed with the teguments and filled 
with the vitality of a practical, spiritual power. 

Perhaps it is safe to say that, as it has been the 
stay and staff of the highest religious life, so with- 
out it there had been no abiding Universal Church. 
It would be an interesting work to show the 
practical importance of this great truth in detail, 
to trace its bearings on other revealed truths, — 
how it works itself in essentially with the atonement 



70 Lecture Second. 

of the God-man, how it brightens into life in the 
agency of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and how- 
it thus exalts the whole Christian experience to a 
higher plane in its faith, its comforts, its strength, 
and its assured victory. 

But the limits of our time forbid such expatia- 
tion. I can only suggest that each Christian may 
educe this rich development in his own personal 
consciousness, and close with the invocation that 
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal 
Son, the love of God, the Father, and the fellow- 
ship of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, may be 
with us all, now and evermore. Amen ! 



LECTURE III. 



THE ATONEMENT. 



LECTURE III. 

THE ATONEMENT. 

OUR theme to-night is the doctrine of the 
atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Al- 
though we cannot, by searching, find out God, or un- 
derstand the Almighty to perfection, yet when he 
himself leaves hanging out from the deep sanctuary 
where he dwells loops of suggestion to fasten our 
thoughts upon, our minds will seize them and try to 
climb up into the mystery of the meaning of things ; 
and although these suggestions be only partial and 
fragmentary, they may serve to show oftentimes 
what that meaning is not, though they fail to 
disclose its full interior force. That the word of 
God ascribes to the death of Christ an efficacy and 
importance belonging to the death of no other per- 
son, there is of course no question. It stands out 



74 Lecture Third. 



in history, with its associated facts, a perfectly 
unique fact, and its spiritual significance is no less 
sublimely singular. That significance is that the 
immortal welkbeing of our race depends absolutely 
upon the fact that Jesus Christ died. That the 
human soul could be saved only through Christ, 
was the alphabetical faith of Christianity; that 
salvation was in consequence of Christ's dying, 
was the next step of supplementary belief. 

In this simple form it became the heritage of 
the generations for two hundred years. The church 
was not in a condition to deal with theological 
reasonings. The dogmatic period had not come 
in. The company of believers had all that they 
could do to live: to give a reason to their pagan 
enemies why they should live was often beyond 
their mental competency. In multitudes of in- 
stances they could only say, " I believe," and then 
die. Perhaps we can measure the extent of their 
faith in Christ's atonement from the instance of 
Philip and the Eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles. 
The Eunuch was reading from the Prophet Isaiah, 
" He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as 
the sheep before her shearer is dumb, so opened 



The Atonement. 75 

he not his mouth." The context of these words is, 
He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. 
He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our 
peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are 
healed. " Of whom speaketh the Prophet this," 
said the Eunuch, " of himself or of some other 
man ? " Then Philip began at the same place, and 
preached unto him Jesus, — Jesus, as the fulfilment 
of that stirring prophecy, suffering, but not for 
himself, innocent of all wrong but bearing the sins 
of many, wounded and bruised like a criminal, not 
for his own transgression, but for ours. The 
Eunuch accepted this gospel, was baptized in its 
faith, and went on his way rejoicing. It was 
gospel enough for the salvation of a world, and 
the faith of the simple fact of Christ's death could 
transform the unhappy heart of sin into a fountain 
of peace and joy. The essential element of this 
belief lay in the vicariousness of Christ's suffering. 
Whatever he endured was as a substitute for sin- 
ners. Believing this, they asked not how or why ; 
they rested in no formula of words, but in the per- 
sonal, divine, dying Christ, whose death was their 



j6 Lecture Third. 



life. By this they lived and died. But when the 
dogmatic period dawned, the Church began to 
think out explanations and to form theories of the 
Atonement, and in doing so they would pitch upon 
some word of Scripture which signified the charac- 
ter of the Atonement, and that word would be made 
the germ point of a theory. There were many 
such words, and each one denoted a distinct aspect 
of the atoning work. 

Kedemption, mediation, sacrifice, purchase, pro- 
pitiation, ransom, — a theory built on either of these 
words alone was pretty sure to run into some im- 
practicable conclusion; and even to join them 
together was to make the theory loose-jointed and 
incongruous. These descriptive words all agreed, 
however, in one essential meaning ; they all denoted 
something done by one person for and in behalf 
of another person; the element of vicariousness 
was wrapped up in them all. Of these suggestive 
words the word " ransom " seems to have seized 
the minds of the age the earliest. They knew 
what ransom meant, the buying back from slavery, 
because it was the daily usage of all the peoples of 
the earth, and they adopted the idea as the prime 



The Atonement. 77 



element of Christ's atonement. But then the 
question came, From whom did Christ buy back 
the lost race of men ? Who was their master and 
what was the slavery ? The slavery, it was 
answered, is sin, and the enslaving power is Satan ; 
hence the great ransom was paid to God's prime 
enemy, the Prince of Evil. He had snatched the 
jewel souls of men from the diadem of the Al- 
mighty, and by the laws of conquest they were 
his, unless their former owner and creator should 
buy them back by some equivalent, and that 
equivalent was his Son's life, rendered up under 
such circumstances of agony and woe as, while 
Heaven mourned, the arch-fiend triumphed. To 
our ears such a statement has the sound of a shriek, 
a discord of horror and absurdity; yet it was the 
favorite theory for a thousand years, — not unbroken 
by protest and denial, but with enough of continuity 
to make a chain of great names in its support. I 
cannot recite the objections that led to. its over- 
throw, but they are such as rise up in our Christian 
thoughts much more easily than in minds whose 
thinking was done for them, and which knew 
nothing of the Bible, — the generations of the Dark 



yS Lecture Third. 



Ages. It might seem to have sprung from the 
Mamchean philosophy, which held a dualism in 
the government of the world, — good and bad powers 
equally independent and always contending for 
sovereignty. 

The empire of this theory, which had run through 
ages of secularism and corruption in the church, 
was broken by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
in the early part of the twelfth century. 

In his great book entitled " Why God became 
Man," he lifted the whole conception of Christ's 
atonement into the blended light of the essential 
deity and the essential humanity, and showed that, 
as man's first, last misery was personal guiltiness, 
so his first, last, total want was the blotting out 
of that guiltiness, the free and absolute forgiveness 
of his sins. Christ therefore made propitiation to 
the Father, not to Satan, and the Father, who 
would otherwise be held back from forgiveness by 
the sanction of his holiness, justice, and truth, 
could now pronounce his law, which embodied all 
the three, satisfied and vindicated. 

Mercy and Truth met together, Kighteousness 
and Peace kissed each other at the cross when 



The Atonement. 79 



Jesus died. God could now be just and still 
justify the ungodly. This theory of Anselm's was 
argued with immense force of logic, and with that 
knowledge of human nature which comes from 
profound religious experience, holding the heart 
up between itself and God, so that in his divine 
light a man sees himself as in a transparency. 
But not even the great power and piety of Anselm 
could gain supremacy for his theory at once. It 
lived a checkered life up to the sixteenth century, 
— the period of the Reformation, — when it became 
the accepted type of religious thinking among the 
most strenuous thinkers of the most strenuous age 
of history. The emancipation of the human mind 
which sprang of that grand epoch, the depth of 
spiritual insight begotten of the free reading of 
God's word, the vigor of the whole manhood of 
man which came up into consciousness under the 
stimulating force of freedom, were mainly centred 
on religious themes. 

The influence of the schoolmen in sharpening 
the thinking powers had prepared the way for the 
handling of deep and abstract topics, and there 
were none others to challenge their thoughts. 



8o Lecture Third. 



The brilliant era of material science was full two 
centuries in the future. Bacon was not yet born 
to discover or recover the master-key of induction 
which was to unlock the penetralia of Nature, so 
that men could enter, and explore her open secrets. 
Hence the accumulated thought of the age threw 
its whole weight into theology, canvassing and 
criticising its deep revelations, and none so much 
as the central one of Christ's redeeming work, its 
methods and its power, how it could obviate the 
moral demerit of man and procure the pardon of 
his sins. 

Men saw that this was the pivot truth of revela- 
tion; that the whole gospel was gathered into it; 
that if there were no substitute to bear the retri- 
bution of man's guilt, there was to human concep- 
tions no assignable reason why there should be a 
gospel at all, with its tremendous sacrifice of a 
humiliated God. The gospel would be then only 
a reduplication of the religion of nature, with the 
addition of the Divine Person to reinforce the 
testimony of the Divine works. 

Martin Luther, with his intense soul, seized 
upon the divinity of the atonement with such an 



The Atonement. 8 1 



absolute embrace as seemed almost to neutralize 
the responsibility of man. Christ was the be- 
liever's substituted righteousness, not only by what 
he endured, but likewise by what he did; his 
active as well as his passive obedience were in the 
place and in behalf of man's. His theory seemed 
to involve the conclusion that since, because Christ 
suffered for human sin, man need not suffer, so if 
Christ obeyed for man, then man need not obey. 
It was charged with unhinging the code of moral 
sanctions, and inaugurating a saturnalia of licen- 
tiousness. But Luther repelled the vicious con- 
clusion by replying that although the law of 
obedience was blotted out by the blood of Christ, 
yet the new Christ life of the believer was its own 
inspired and instinctive law. Obedience would 
grow out of him instead of being forced upon him. 
The Lutheran doctrine became essentially the 
doctrine of all the reformed churches, though 
modified by various theories touching the method 
of the atonement, each theory being met by 
specific objections. The theories all agreed, how- 
ever, in maintaining the idea of substitution as the 
characteristic and vital element of the atoning 



82 Lecture Third. 



work, so that with the body of believers there was 
a substantial unity of faith. 

We can easily understand to what classes of 
religious thinkers the fundamental idea of substi- 
tution would be absolutely repulsive. The Arian, 
who denied the divinity of Christ, would of course 
refuse assent to the idea throughout, since it was 
absurd to suppose that a created being could offer 
a meritorious satisfaction for the sins of a world. 

The Sabellian, maintaining that Christ was only 
the Father with another name, must likewise deny 
the substitution, because it is impossible to think 
of the same person offering sacrifice and propitia- 
tion to himself. 

The Arian views were represented by Socinus, 
the lineal predecessor of the Unitarians; but the 
Sabellian theory of the Trinity had not then, so 
far as I know, any class representative. The revi- 
val of Sabellianism was of later date. Its reappear- 
ance is, indeed, an event of our century, and it 
occurred, not so much as a lapse from the true 
belief as a recoil from the dreary, dark denial of 
Christianity itself, which involved the churches of 
Germany, through several generations. The Ger- 



The Atonement. 83 



mans had translated into their own tongue the 
writings of the English deists of the seventeenth 
century, and had transformed their matter-of-fact 
unbelief into the sublimated speculations that 
characterize the Teutonic thinking. Their scepti- 
cism took the form of a philosophy which culmi- 
nated in pantheism, rejecting the Bible entirely, or 
else trying to square its statements with their 
philosophy, and torturing the sacred writings by 
interpretations of melancholy grotesqueness. From 
such a system of madly independent thought, a 
doctrine like that of the atonement would of neces- 
sity drop out ; and while the Church was dominated 
by the Schools, and its ministers were of their 
training, the former faith became, with few excep- 
tions, a dead orthodoxy. Here and there was 
heard a solitary and gentle reclaim from some 
whose religious consciousness could not quite be 
obscured by the philosophical fog, men of fervid 
piety, but with such an overruling influence of 
their academic training that it seems almost as if 
their philosophy was their gospel after all. 

Schleiermacher represents most truly this partial 
return of faith from the wild verge to which it had 



84 Lecture Third. 



run, and with him and his sanctified philosophy, 
Christianity became respectable again, and Christ a 
power; but even with him it is not Christ, the 
sacrifice, the propitiation, the High Priest, but 
Christ, the loving and living Son of God, coming 
down to draw men to himself by the attractions of 
his spiritual loveliness and by the fulness with 
which he meets the soul's aspiration after God. 

Beautiful, fascinating as this sort of faith is, it 
fails, evidently, to reach the deep relation of Christ 
to our moral nature, which our nature, awakened 
to its utter need, feels even to the centre of its 
consciousness. This system is, however, so clear 
an advance from the dead sea of philosophical un- 
belief towards the promised land of God's people, 
that the Christian faith may thank God and take 
courage, with the hope of a restored, believing 
Germany. 

The German philosophy, in its improved form, 
was borrowed into England by Coleridge, and was 
set forth by him to a school of thoughtful disciples, 
numbering men of the purest character and of the 
finest minds in the realm. His influence was that 
of an oracle, speaking sometimes as from the glory 



The Atonement. 85 



of an open firmament of light and sometimes from 
the darkness of a clouded sky, but always with an 
authority that seemed to come down from above. 
Almost the whole school of his disciples were led 
by him into a style of religious thinking that sank 
the cross out of its singular eminence. The propi- 
tiatory element of the doctrine of the atonement 
was volatilized, and escaped. The idea of substi- 
tution was rejected; "vicarious" became an ill- 
sounding word ; the ground-work of atonement, as 
laid in the moral guiltiness of man, was covered 
up. " Guilt " seemed a word of another vocabulary. 
Man's sinfulness was represented as very much a 
misfortune, but as hardly more. God's love was 
presented as the attributes which engrossed and 
concealed the other attributes in its own bosom of 
light; his holiness, his justice, his truth, were not 
considered as leading powers in his administrative 
relations with man. Judgment and the retribu- 
tions of a life after this seemed to be practically 
disallowed, and God, as a moral administrator, the 
Deity of an obsolete dispensation. His character 
was displayed as a pure fatherliness. In fact, it 
was customary to say that the single purpose of 



86 Lecture Third. 



the mission of the Son of God was to proclaim the 
fatherhood of God as a truth of glory hitherto 
unrevealed. 

To the common definition of atonement the con- 
stant reply was that atonement means reconcilia- 
tion, and that of the two parties at variance God 
needs no reconciliation. His fatherly heart is al- 
ready bending itself towards the wickedest, and it 
is man alone who needs to be influenced and 
changed. To awaken or create the temper of rec- 
onciliation in the human soul Christ came in 
mighty humiliation, was incarnated, taught, en- 
dured a life of cruel self-denial, which, by its 
persuasive pathos, might subdue the hard unwill- 
ingness that kept man from God. To this life of 
sorrow and wretchedness his death was only the 
apt and necessary conclusion. And all this, his 
life as much as his death, was his atonement. 

Next to this it follows that, to become a Chris- 
tian, a man must tread in the footsteps of Christ, 
obey his precepts, especially imitating the daily 
self-denial of the Saviour, and so achieving for him- 
self a Christly character. In all this the sacrificial 
character of Christ's death is impatiently set aside 



The Atonement. 87 



with the grouped thoughts that gathered to it from 
before and behind, — man's guilt and helpless doom, 
the life-giving power of faith in a Divine substi- 
tute of doom, the Holy Spirit's help covenanted 
by the atoning death, and the final acceptance of 
the soul with God, — accepted in the beloved. I 
have called this the Sabellian view of the atone- 
ment, not because all who hold it must necessarily 
be Sabellians, but because the Sabellian doctrine 
of the Trinity will harmonize with no other doctrine 
of the atonement except this. It is a doctrine that 
has grown and is growing with the Century, in 
England and in America, in the English Church 
and in our own. It numbers among its teachers 
and preachers bright and pure men, whose elevated 
lives seem to vouch, as far as a life can vouch, for 
the truth of their doctrine. As it was in the case 
of Arius and Apollinarius, and with our early Uni- 
tarians, so was it with the Brothers Hare, and with 
Maurice and Robertson and Stanley and Dr. John 
Young in England, and with Bushnell in America. 
Before we investigate the causes that have given 
birth and vigorous currency to this theory, let us 
test some of its positions by the Scriptures. I 



88 Lecture Third. 



think that its foremost assertion that Christ came 
to proclaim the fatherhood of God, hitherto an un- 
acknowledged truth, is an assertion that lacks the 
warranty of the Word of God. I am not sure that 
the Old Testament has fewer declarations of God's 
paternal character than the New, and if it has, I 
am sure that those declarations are so emphatic, 
and their illustrations so subduingly tender, that 
none can be more so. The Concordance will show 
how often the gracious title is employed. The 
Psalms reveal the fatherhood in such winning 
guise that Jesus seems to have adopted it as the 
illustration of his own loving nurture of his flock. 
The whole twenty-third Psalm is full of the father- 
hood. That it was not a fatherhood of the Jews 
alone, but of all mankind, was recognized by the 
prophet, — " Doubtless thou art our father, though 
Abraham be ignorant of us." 

The first postulate of the theory, therefore, seems 
to be too hastily assumed. Take next the state- 
ment that Christ's whole life was one of painful 
self-denial, which was a chief element of the per- 
suasive reconciling power that lay in his life's 
suffering as much as in the pains of his death. 



The Atonement. 89 



This statement, again, seems hardly to be borne out 
by the narrative of the four Gospels ; for up to his 
thirtieth year, Jesus lived the common life of his 
family and friends, with no more than the usual 
trials of an humble condition of life, the economy 
of a community not rich. In that year he com- 
menced his ministry with his baptism. Then the 
Father's word came down from the open heaven to 
warrant his commission of Messiahship, — " This is 
my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Then 
the Holy Ghost descended upon him to endow him 
wijih the full spirit and power of Messiahship, and 
filling him then, for the first time, with its ripe con- 
sciousness, leads him into the wilderness to hold 
for forty days transcendent and delighted com- 
munion with his Father, — communion so transcend- 
ent that its rapture absorbed all consciousness of 
physical want. Afterwards he was an hungered, 
and Satan came upon his exhausted frame and 
tortured it with temptations; but even in his ex- 
haustion his new-born consciousness of power 
defeated the Tempter with a word. Here is the 
first thing that can be called a pain in Christ's life, 
if that may be called a pain which was the occa- 



go Lecture Third. 



sion of such easy, divine victory: it was no self- 
denial, but the calm superiority of the spirit over 
matter, of heaven over earth. We cannot conceive 
of his being for an instant in doubt, or of his con- 
science wavering for a moment from its heaven- 
ward poise. True, he learned what the power of 
Satan must be over us, his frail brotherhood, and 
he taught us too that thereby he was fitted to be 
a sympathizing intercessor with the Father, and 
that we should conquer even as he conquered. 

For three years after this he lived the life of a 
pilgrim, with no home of his own, but not without 
friends whose home was his, and never in all the 
time complaining of any material hardship or trial. 
But as the time of his death approached, there 
came the agony of heart and soul in Gethsemane 
that made him the very prophetic " Man of sor- 
rows, acquainted with grief." Yet this sorrow 
was associated, not with his life, but with the 
atoning death he was to die, — a shadow of its 
gloom in advance. There would seem to have 
been no other real sorrow of Christ, none that a 
genuine, generous manhood would not refuse to 
call such, except those divine human griefs, in- 



The Atonement. 91 



accessible to human conception, which made at 
once the indescribable woe and the unutterable 
glory of the cross. To affirm self-denial in the life 
of Christ as a pain and a torment seems to be as 
unworthy of him as it is untrue to Scripture. To 
say that his life, equally with his death, made part 
of his suffering for man, is to ignore the open pas- 
sages where his redemption is centred in the one 
point of his dying. "Redemption through His 
blood, even the forgiveness of sins," is the brief 
formula which conveys, in whatever variations, 
the truth that the atonement was concentred at 
the cross. It sounds out in the various language 
of the Bible, and it sounds down from the song of 
the redeemed. And more yet, when Christ him- 
self would show us how he would have us hold the 
faith, he embodied it in a memorial sacrament ex- 
hibiting the concrete of the gospel, the unchang- 
ing type of Christian belief, — his body and his 
blood, his death, not his life. 

Again, the theory that we are canvassing declares 
that Christ came to illustrate the divine love, and 
so to persuade men to repentance. Dr. Bushnell 
explains it thus: A person who has inflicted an 



92 Lecture Third. 



injury upon another is apt to imagine him to be 
in a state of chronic resentment; hence he is sus- 
picious of him and avoids him. If overtures of 
reconciliation are made, he suspects their sincerity ; 
if he is assured that the feelings of the injured 
person are still kindly and complacent, he cannot 
be made to believe it. And so, fearing a latent 
resentment burrowing in the heart of his enemy, 
he dares not put himself within its reach and keeps 
off in estrangement and hostility. 

So is it, says Dr. Bushnell, with man and God. 
Man, being the offender, supposes God to be his 
enemy ; hence he avoids him, is afraid of him. If 
he believed that God truly loved him, it would 
melt down the iron of his impenitence and bring 
him into a state of reconciliation. To convince 
him of his love, God blesses him with the good 
things of his Providence; and as man still doubts, 
God sends him special messages in his Word, as- 
suring him of his abiding paternal tenderness ; and 
when, after all, man still holds in his bosom, like 
a demon, the infesting doubt, God comes down 
himself, and dies on the cross, to show the supreme 
strength of his love, proving by symbol what he 



The Atonement. 93 



had already declared by word. The death of 
Christ, therefore, removes no impediment in the 
way of man's forgiveness. It makes no retributive 
exaction upon his wilful guilt; it tells him to come 
back to the Father he has left, and all will be well; 
it adds no new truth, but reaffirms in a new way 
an old one. The mighty tragedy of the cross is an 
exhibition, arranged on purpose as an exhibition. 

There is a histrionic air in the transaction as 
thus explained that carries to the mind an im- 
pression of unreality, and robs the dreadful death 
of all the persuasive power that is ascribed to it. 
It seems painstaking and artificial, an ingenious 
expedient to produce an emotional effect; and 
when it has done this, the whole force and mean- 
ing of the cross is exhausted. That supreme crisis 
in the history of God's dealings with our apostate 
mankind, which had been the theme of agonized 
and of joyous prophecy through the ages, which 
was to solve the heavenly problem that angels 
desired to look into, — " how God could be just and 
yet justify the ungodly," — the grand event which 
began with the humiliation of God and went od 
controlling the course of affairs, public and private, 



94 Lecture Third. 



and leading the whole order of Divine Providence 
in its train, so that it became the focal point to 
which the natural and moral attributes of God had 
long tended, and were now centred as to a finality, 
a consummation, beyond which there could be 
nothing more, — this crowning crisis was after all 
to be only a display, showing nothing that man 
did not know before, but only asserting it in such 
a way and with such an avowed purpose of dis- 
play as to impair its moral influence, and to put 
the mind into a critical mood that would of itself 
drive the sensibilities back into inaccessibility. 
The great experiment on human feeling would 
thus inevitably precipitate its own failure. It is 
most different, I think, to all this when the death 
of the Son of God is the propitiation for the guilt 
of the world, a penal death that bore on its broad 
substitution the sins of mankind, meeting the 
demands of eternal truth and righteousness, and 
abolishing human guilt forever. That death is no 
mere display, not a simple method of persuasion. 
It does something; it reverses the moral condition 
of man, changes it from dark doom to hope and 
cheer. 



The Atonement. 95 



It is indeed an exhibition of Divine love, but not 
of love proposing and preparing itself for exhibi- 
tion alone. The love is seen in its purpose and its 
results, — Christ dying to save us from dying, dying 
once for all, that we need not die eternally. " Here- 
in is love, that God gave his Son to be the propiti- 
ation for our sins." When the Divine love comes 
out into this light it comes with a persuasive force 
as strong as the felt value of the soul. It is not 
what the cross seems, but what it does, that makes 
it a power. If the soul can ever be subdued and 
reclaimed to God by the death of Christ, it is when 
it sees in that death the redeeming purchase of its 
own forfeited life, the blood-bought pardon of its 
guilt. Then it is a power of regeneration that 
grasps the soul around, and holds it in the de- 
lighted embrace of God and his salvation. Upon 
this point, namely, the comparative efficacy of the 
two theories of the atonement in meeting the wants 
of the soul in its most awakened life, we may refer 
even to Dr. Bushnell himself, a witness of author- 
ity, who, in his work on Vicarious Atonement, 
makes a concession against his own principles as 
remarkable, perhaps, as anything in all literature. 



g6 Lecture Third. 



After elaborating the Sabellian theory of the atone- 
ment throughout nearly his whole volume, with 
his accustomed vigor of argument and rhetoric, he 
passes in one of the closing chapters to consider 
its value and power as an experimental truth, and 
compares it with the accepted doctrine of the atone- 
ment, which he calls the " Altar Theory." In this 
comparison he frankly admits that to a person op- 
pressed with the convictions of conscience and the 
sense of guiltiness, his theory ministers no solace. 
It does not satisfy the instinctive perception of 
righteousness, which is always strongest and clear- 
est in a soul convicted of its own unrighteousness, 
and which always joins together sin and retribu- 
tion as necessary correlatives. The " Altar View " 
alone will meet and satisfy the cravings of that 
awakened and conscience-stricken person. Christ 
must be presented to him as a sacrifice, oblation, 
and satisfaction for his sins, and then, re- 
nouncing all other trust, he rests upon the merit 
of a dying Saviour, and finds the surpassing peace 
of pardon through his blood. On reading this 
strange admission, one can hardly help asking, " If 
the author knew the worthlessness of his theory 



The Atonement. 97 



before he wrote his book, why did he write it ? 
If he did not know it till the book was written, 
why did he publish it ? " 

This theory chimes in, no doubt, with the hu- 
manitarianism of the age, which thinks more of 
compassion than of justice and righteousness. The 
engrossment of our philanthropy confines our con- 
templations so much to the earth and its wants, 
that we fail to look up to the heavens, and to Him 
who dwelleth therein. Man's wants and poverty 
lead us to overlook man's crimes, till we come to 
feel that God will overlook them too; and when 
once the sense and appreciation of guilt goes out, 
all the grand, grave truths of the Bible that postu- 
late that guilt must fail of access to the conscious- 
ness of men. 

The prosperity and self-indulgence of the times, 
the triumph of scientific thought, the skill of our 
arts, the pride of our freedom, all conspire to make 
man the all in all, and God the ready servitor. 
The Bible grows into disuse, and then into disre- 
spect; its theology is discarded as narrow, its sol- 
emn sanctions as null. It is as if, in our self- 
sufficiency, the general mind had been drugged with 



98 Lecture Third. 



henbane, and through its dilated pupil saw every- 
thing only broad and dim. 

Turning from the criticism of theories, let us 
consider a question often asked, " What is the test 
quality by which, among all the theories of the 
atonement, we may know the true one, — the one 
maintained in the Christian consciousness of the 
ages ? " I suppose the true answer to be that what- 
ever theory recognizes the death of Christ as a 
reason or an influence, on account of which God 
grants us the grace of his forgiveness, such is es- 
sentially a true doctrine of the atonement. If, on 
the other hand, the theory represents the death of 
Christ as having no effect Godward, but only as a 
moral power, a divine persuasive to man's soul, 
then, though Christ be exhibited in the fascination 
of his living person, the beauty of his benevolence, 
and the whole varied loveliness of his life, or be 
presented as a martyr dying for the truth, and the 
dying be tinged with such pathos that we pity and 
weep, and are aroused and are indignant, all at 
once, yet if there be no more than this, the theory 
fails of that Scriptural accord without which it is 
a fallacy. At this point the road forks, and while 



The Atonement. 99 



the one theory holds the soul to Christ, and leads 
the church to God, higher and nearer as the road 
leads forward, the other theory has none but a de- 
scending advance, the farther the lower, until it 
may reach the common terrestrial level where 
Christ is no better than Socrates, or the Gospel 
than the Memorabilia. Although I have dis- 
cussed our theme at such length, I am loath to let 
it go. 

Among the diverse theories which hold the es- 
sential idea of atonement, is there any one which 
commends itself specially as denoting the true 
method ? To my mind, there is one grandly pe- 
culiar and satisfying to the human consciousness 
of guilt. I can do hardly more than suggest it. 
It is grounded on the strange, heart-stirring cry of 
Christ upon the cross, " My God, my God ! Why 
hast thou forsaken me ? " These words admit of 
no rhetorical gloss. It were monstrous to torture 
them by a various reading. They are a live pic- 
ture of Christ's consciousness. He was forsaken 
of his Father. We may not analyze his condition 
of mind, but it must have been pure woe. The 
filial consciousness of the Divine Son towards the 



ioo Lecture Third. 



Divine Father was broken. He was as an alien. 
If this be so, then we can understand the only real 
woe that ever came near to the soul and life of 
Christ. It was the very woe he came to bear; it 
was the culminating point of his redeeming work. 
For this cause came he to this hour. It was the 
cup his Father had given him, and he drank it. 
And whence and why this woe ? the soul reverently 
asks. Was this a penal woe ? It was either this 
or else gratuitous cruelty. It was penal, then ; but 
penal on whose account ? He did no sin. Look 
at it a moment, and remember that God's deser- 
tion is the specific doom of sin. "Depart from 
me" is the formulated woe of eternity; and that 
woe, the precise penalty of human guilt, was pre- 
cisely forestalled upon the cross. He bore our sins 
and carried our sorrows; he was our very substi- 
tute in penal suffering. "Thou shalt make his 
soul an offering for sin.' Can we go any further ? 
Perhaps so. The Son of God — the eternal Logos 

was the Creator and the light and life of men. 

His being was incorporated with human life be- 
fore he was born of Mary. His incarnation was 
the symbol of a foregone and still subsisting fact 



The Atonement. 101 

that the Son of God and humanity were life of life. 
Everything that Christ did, he did for man in 
man's place as man, man's representative. In the 
agony of the garden humanity suffered with him ; 
on the cross humanity cried out; in that penal 
woe, to which Christ gave his consenting soul, hu- 
manity was bearing its penalty. He acted and 
suffered for us, and we by him. It was by no fic- 
tion of law, by no technical relation, that he was 
our surety and our substitute: he was our very 
selves. In him humanity bowed itself to the in- 
fliction, owned its perfect righteousness, and was 
restored to a divine sonship. A soul may still re- 
luct, resist, rebel; but when it turns to God at 
last, it claims affiance with the dying Elder Brother 
of the race, echoes his cry of agony as if it were 
its own cry, consents as he consented, and feels 
and knows that the great satisfaction has been 
made in its divine fulness, and that henceforth 
there is no condemnation. 

This may be the true method of atonement, yet 
whether true or not, we know it is not the method, 
but the glorious fact itself, on which our faith 
must rest ; and resting there, we are prepared to 



102 Lecture Third. 



glorify our Redeemer by an ever-adoring service 
of gratitude here on earth, and to join in the song 
of the saved above, " Worthy the Lamb " who has 
redeemed us to God by his blood ! 



LECTURE IY. 

THE HOLY GHOST 



LECTURE IV. 



THE HOLY GHOST. 



FOE, this fourth lecture I take for my subject 
11 The Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of 
life." So the subject is designated in the creed. 

The triple personality of the Godhead is not a 
truth without its fruits. We are taught that in 
the economy of the Divine administration each 
personality has its distinct function and agency, — 
the Father as the prime administrator, with whom 
is authority, counsel, and direction; the Son, the 
eternal Logos, as the expressive power the man- 
ifester of God, whether by word or life, whether 
before or after his incarnation ; and the Holy Ghost 
as the practical energy of Deity, to make effectual 
the Divine counsels by living results through all 
the realms of creation and with all classes of cre- 

(105} 



io6 Lecture Fourth. 



ated things. When we speak of the works of God, 
therefore, we define the specific agency and power 
of the Holy Ghost. Whatever of omnipotence, of 
omniscience, or of omnipresence is involved in 
producing and maintaining the universe, is the 
working power of Deity through the third person 
of the Godhead. 

Thus the whole amplitude of the world is opened 
out before us Its manifold forms of subsistence 
come into review one by one; for he is the giver 
of life to them all, and their presiding Lord as 
well. 

We begin, therefore, with the physical creation, 
of which the Scriptural account runs thus: " In the 
beginning God created the heaven and the earth, 
and the earth was without form and void, and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the 
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 
And God said, Let there be light, and there was 
light." 

Of course a description like this will have to en- 
counter what are called the discoveries of modern 
science which claim to have exploded this whole 
history of the creation as partly a fallacy and the 



The Holy Ghost. 107 



rest an absurdity. The alleged absurdity lies in 
supposing, as this account seems to suppose, that 
God created something out of nothing, whereas 
it is an axiom of science that nothing can ever 
be produced from nothing. Now this axiom is 
brought down to us from the ancient philosophies, 
in which a personal Creator had no recognized 
place. It is a maxim which gauges the possibilities 
of things by a simply human standard. No skill 
of man could ever produce something out of 
nothing, and no wit of man, which can affirm only 
from experience, can understand how it can be 
done; and so it is peremptorily affirmed to be 
impossible. 

The weakness of the objection lies in its leaving 
out the presence and power of a Creator, who is 
infinitely greater than man, and who, for aught 
that we know, can perform an act of pure and sim- 
ple creation, bringing entity out of non-entity. 

There is no self-contradiction in the statement. 

The difficulty lies in our not being able to con- 
ceive how it can be done, and this difficulty besets 
all our thinking when we think about the works 
of God. This objection, grounded in our ignorance, 



108 Lecture Fourth. 

ought not to claim the dignity of an argument, 
still less assume the authority of a universal denial 
of possibility. Though founded on an accredited 
axiom of science, it is plainly unphilosophical and 
beyond the modesty of reason. 

Moreover, to deny the possible creation of some- 
thing out of nothing is to assert the eternity of 
material substance, distinct from the nature and 
substance of God, — a theory which involves several 
rational difficulties. 

For if matter be eternal, then its existence must 
be a necessary existence, which is self-existence 
that cannot be impaired or modified by any other 
power. It must be endued with all the essential 
attributes of infinitude, — a deity in and of itself, 
a rival of God, ever at war with him, unless one 
or the other God parts with some of his attributes, 
which, since each exists, not of his own will, but 
by necessity, neither can do. 

It is the old Manichean notion, long since ad- 
judged a fallacy by the consenting reason of 
mankind. 

Assuming, then, the creation of crude amorphous 
matter, without form and void of organic life, we 



The Holy Ghost. 109 



are told that " the Spirit of God moved upon the 
face of the waters." 

The expression beautifully denotes a hovering, 
brooding action, as if shedding down upon the 
fluid mass a generative power, when all at once 
went forth the life-giving fiat, " Let there be light," 
and the world became charged with the diffusive 
energy, " light was." 

It may be interesting to inquire how far the 
verified statements of science can be made to 
square with this history of creation. Accepting 
as the last discovery of Scientific research the ex- 
istence of a substance, protoplasm or bioplasm, 
which forms the basis of all organic life (although 
all scientific men do not admit its universality), 
accepting, likewise, its wonderful microscopic de- 
velopments, its corpuscles, monads, cells, and 
atoms, we are all aglow with the enthusiasm of 
discovery. We seem to be penetrating the grand 
secret of universal existence. Yet presently we 
are arrested by an impracticability. We have not 
found the source of life; we have only reached the 
microscopic limit of form. Every one of these 
atoms of matter is itself an organized substance, 



no Lecture Fourth. 

moulded and combined of simpler elements by- 
virtue of that life-power which is alone the pro- 
ducer of organism. 

Whence is that life-power, the grand, universal 
motor from which all organic life is begotten? 
" Grant me," says a chief Priest of Science, — 
" grant me only a particle of protoplasm and the 
merest scintilla of force, and with time enough I 
can evolve the universe." Most true; but we 
cannot grant it unless science can discover it. It 
would not be scientific to do so. And if it be not 
granted, then how stands the problem? 

Force, the power of motion, is a thing entirely 
foreign to matter. Matter is inert and eternally 
at rest, unless moved from without, and, we add, 
from above, from the great personal will that, in 
the person of the Divine Spirit, broods upon the 
vapory chaos which Science itself teaches to have 
been the first loose form of things, and, with one 
stroke of force, sets the elements to work produc- 
ing atoms, cells, monads, and diffused bioplasm, 
until the chaos becomes a kosmos. How congru- 
ous, then, with scientific suggestion is the Scripture 
history of creation, — " Let there be light," and 



The Holy Ghost. Ill 



light was. As was explained in my first lecture, 
science has demonstrated the beautiful truth of 
the correlation of forces, showing that light and 
heat and electricity and magnetism, and the rest 
are congeners and may work a common office, and 
that any one of them, by whatever name it be 
called, may replace the rest, and produce the 
organic results of creation. 

The parent force of this family of forces is, 
according to the present tendency of scientific 
opinion, simple motion, which, like a living centre, 
radiates and evolves itself into the various forms 
of material energy. Accepting this conclusion, we 
see the Divine volition impinging, at a stroke, on 
the chaotic mass, and producing what our common 
experience proves to be the first result of volition, 
viz., motion, the action and interaction of the 
material elements upon each other, establishing 
the immediate play of affinities, working instant 
combinations of form, and, throughout the mighty 
stir, attesting itself in a flash of universal light. 
" Let there be light" is the word-form of the Al- 
mighty volition ; " there was light" denotes its 
outcome into visible effect. 



112 Lecture Fourth. 



As the eye answers at a glance to the summons 
received by the ear, so the flashing world responded 
on the instant to the spoken will of God. To 
human conception the volition, the resulting mo- 
tion, and the attesting light would be simultaneous, 
without gap or pause for a single interposing 
thought. Therefore, the suddenness implied in 
the Scripture account of creation is no objection to 
its truth. 

The entrance of force must always be instanta- 
neous. No matter how slow and complicated the 
antecedent conditions of life, there is a moment 
when life is not; and there is another and next 
moment when it is. The quickening act is a dart, 
a thrill, a stroke of force, whose effect is not a pro- 
duction from itself, but the presence of itself. The 
power begotten is the simple transfer of the power 
begetting. Hence the scientific truth, as well as 
the rhetorical sublimity, of the creative fiat, — 
*' Let there be light, and there was light." 

" I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord" as well 
as "the Giver of life." That is, the material crea- 
tion is still under the daily regulating power of 
the Creator. 



The Holy Ghost. 113 

The minds of men have been long divided on the 
question whether the Divine superintendence of 
the world is indeed a present fact. Did God, when 
he set the universe in motion, establish for it a 
self- regulating system of laws, and leave it to run 
on, like a clock, to its assigned terminus of dura- 
tion, and then withdraw himself into the seclusion 
of his self-existence; or is he present in every 
movement ? Is every movement of things, no 
matter how minute, the impulse of a distinct 
volition of Omnipotence, so that the changing play 
of atoms, the delicate interlacing of affinities, and 
every miscroscopic vibration shall be the products 
of so many mental purposes of the universal 
wisdom ? The former theory — that God has retired 
from the immediate direction of the universe into 
a calm self-subsistence — has the look of Buddha 
about it; it suggests a changeless fate; it bars out 
the fatherhood ; it forbids a miracle or a Providence ; 
it chills the spontaneous gratitude that comes from 
feeling God in nature and life; it makes our moral 
pilgrimage a cheerless, dreary, dreadful way. 

It is the preferred theory of Science, however; 
and making the world everything and God nothing, 



114 Lecture Fourth. 



establishing law as having no interfering lawgiver, 
Science can the more courageously speculate to 
conclusions in which the idea of a personal God is 
as a cipher. If Science would admit the concep- 
tion of him as the present Lord as well as the first 
Giver of life, how would the glitter of her several 
discoveries gather a mellow beauty, as they flashed 
forth from amidst the great cloud of glory that 
embodies the infinite Godhead ! 

But touching the second theory that God works 
by his immediate presence, even in the minutest 
phenomena of nature, it is objected that it seems 
impossible to be conceived, and that it belittles the 
conception of him to our minds, to think of him as 
among the atoms of things. 

It is impossible to be conceived, because omni- 
presence is inconceivable, while yet it is very true. 
But, granting omnipresence, God's instant power 
may be very naturally a fact: and if we try to 
suppose the opposite, I think we find it very difficult 
to conceive how his power can be where his 
presence is not. Then, as to the belittling im- 
pression it conveys of God, we should remember 
that to the Infinite One there is no great and no 



The Holy Ghost. 115 



small; great things are contained in small; the 
vast telescopic universe is composed of the micros- 
copic atoms. It seems more worthy of God that he 
should be the Lord of life; and Science will become 
a benefactor to the soul of man when she shall 
admit God's presence with his power, so that not 
a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father, 
and that he numbers the very hairs of our heads. 
Such is the agency and power of the Holy Spirit 
among material things, — giver and director of the 
life of the physical world. 

But he has a higher realm than this. All an- 
imated things come forth from him, and chiefly 
does he hold communion with, and interpenetrate 
with his own life the life of man, — man's intellect, 
his conscience, his affections, and his will. Some 
of these communications of the Spirit bear the 
character of miracle, specially when he imparts to 
the human mind the power of prophesying. The 
creed distinguishes this agency thus, " the Holy 
Ghost who spake by the prophets." 

There is no exercise of the reason of man in 
which it so soon finds the limits of its power as 
when it undertakes to forecast the future of things. 



Il6 Lecture Fourth. 

In the loose connections of daily life and in Politics 
and Political Economy and Finance, where the cal- 
culations of the closet may be disturbed and tossed 
into confusion by any sidelong accident it was im- 
possible to detect, this failure is not so strange; 
but even in the exacter sciences, where material 
laws are fixed and well understood, the failure is 
hardly less flagrant. The wisest Medical skill will 
fail in its predictions almost as often as the guess 
of the empiric. The best scientist of his time pro- 
nounced the impossibility of navigating the At- 
lantic by steamers at the very moment when the 
first steamship was on her bounding way to the 
opposite continent. 

Whenever Science parts with its abstractness, 
and mixes itself with the moving concrete of prac- 
tical life, it r jo far forfeits its certainty. Its high- 
est, its sole achievement is to know what is. God 
has not granted it as a normal attainment of the 
human intellect to read the future. Hence it is that 
the gift of prophecy has always been regarded as a 
a miraculous endowment, attesting a divine influ- 
ence, and to the possessor of the gift men have bowed 
down with reverence and prayers and rich gifts. 



The Holy Ghost. 117 

We need not touch the question of the pagan 
oracles, with their equivocal pronouncements and 
the clinging suspicion of collusion. We are speak- 
ing of the Holy Ghost as he spake by the prophets 
of the elder Scriptures. Those Scriptures are re- 
markable for nothing so much as for their prophecy. 
They are a chain of forecasting testimonies, uttered 
with assurance, and in some cases depicting the 
future with such vivid distinctness that our imag- 
inations can sketch the scene as a transaction before 
our eyes. 

Now these prophecies were mainly concerned 
with the character and biography of one single per- 
son, the promised Messiah, whose history was so 
unique, abounding in incidents so far outside the 
usual current of events, that a single prophecy, 
touching only a few of such events, if it should be 
verified by a fulfilment, would be lifted far above 
the level of a lucky guess, and might claim inspir- 
ation for its origin. But the strangeness is al- 
most infinitely enhanced when we consider the 
vast variety of particulars that were to centre in 
the life of that coming man, Jesus of Nazareth, 
some of them almost self-contradictory and un- 



Ii8 Lecture Fourth. 

warranted by the accepted principles of human 
nature and the laws of probability. 

To show how far towards the infinite the strange- 
ness of fulfilment truly reached, I borrow the state- 
ment of the eminent mathematician, Dr. Olinthus 
Gregory. 

Suppose there had been only ten men professing 
to be prophets, and that each one of the ten should 
fix upon only five independent criteria touching 
place, government, events, doctrine, character, 
sufferings, or death of one particular person; then, 
according to the principles employed by mathe- 
maticians in reference to the doctrine of chances, 
the probability against the happening of these fifty 
particulars in any way is that of the fiftieth power 
of two to unity, that is, the probability is greater 
than eleven hundred and twenty-five millions of 
millions to one that all these circumstances do not 
turn up even at distinct periods. 

Now, if to this computation we add the element 
of time, and consider that any of these predictions 
might, on the principle of chance, take place from 
the time of the prophecy to the end of the world, 
then the chance of their happening at the time 



The Holy Ghost. 119 



predicted would be so unlikely that it surpasses 
the power of numbers to express the improbability. 
Can we say less, then, touching the Messianic pre- 
dictions, than that the Holy Ghost spake by the 
Prophets ? 

As we read those prophecies we cannot avoid 
thinking that " holy men spake as they were 
moved," not knowing always the pregnancy of 
what they spake, sometimes with an unconsciously 
double sense, looking along the line from the 
typical fact before their eyes to the great anti- 
typical event on which the prophecy terminated, 
sometimes speaking with coolness and deliberation, 
at other times wrapt into an abnormal state by the 
vision and the faculty divine, yet uttering with 
their human lips the eternal mind of God. 

But the Holy Ghost has other ways besides the 
Prophetic way of laying himself alongside the mind 
of man, and giving form and pressure to his 
thoughts and mental instincts. In the awakening 
of high moral conceptions, and the stirring of the 
motive powers of the soul to reach out for their 
fulfilment, opening before its lifted eye a surpas- 
sing realm of purity and love and unchecked moral 



120 Lecture Fourth. 

power, to become its own in a life after death, — 
such things have come into mens lives as powers, 
not homeborn, but foreign and divine. Socrates 
seems to have been conscious of it daily. His de- 
mon of good, was it not the directing Holy Ghost ? 

The Holy Ghost again rules in that supernal 
region of man's nature, the region of the moral 
sense. Conscience is indeed the throne of the Holy 
Ghost. It is the regal faculty whose divinity no 
man ever dared deny. Whenever he heard the 
voice of the grand moral imperative and looked 
within, he was sure to stand face to face with the 
Holy Ghost. 

If he thwarted his conscience, defied it, even cru- 
cified it, he has always felt that his antagonism was 
rebellion and that he had crucified his king. The 
function of this Divine Spirit is to touch the cords 
of the moral nature, and to keep its sensibility 
awake to the issues of good and evil. It is He 
who probes the peccant parts of the soul to make 
us feel how deep the sinuous ulcer runs. He de- 
tains our rambling fancies, and makes us think 
with an inner concentration that shall beget a 
better self-knowledge. He shows us right and 



The Holy Ghost. 121 



wrong aloof from those mixed tints of life that 
make sin seem attractive, and reveals to us the 
white light of righteousness, that we can see how 
unshadedly bright is good, and how deadly black, 
without a ray of relieving light, is sin. It is in 
this way, by its clear marking of moral distinctions 
to the soul through the illuminated conscience, 
that the Holy Ghost prepares the way for his cov- 
enanted and commissioned agency as the repre- 
sentative of Christ. 

u He shall take of the things of mine," says the 
Saviour, "and shall show them unto you." In 
order to this, in order to prepare an entrance for 
the Great Salvation, to create a loathing of unright- 
eousness, and a longing in the soul for a perfect 
emancipation from its power, the conscience must 
be both enlightened and sensitive. And then, 
when, possessed by the alternate loathing and long- 
ing, it cries, What shall I do? the indwelling 
Spirit reveals the cross and the Crucified, and im- 
parts to the vague feelings definite shape and 
quality. In the presence of the Crucified, the 
hated unrighteousness seems to the soul like the 
crucifixion of his Lord, and the coveted righteous- 



122 Lecture Fourth 



ness takes on the form of affectionate desire to be 
joined to the personal Saviour. 

This wondrous transformation of a man's moral 
sensibilities marks an epoch in his life. It is so 
novel and unexpected that he feels he never tried 
to produce it, he did not know how. It came to 
him from abroad and worked within him. 

Something not himself has grasped his very self, 
and inspired him with the transcendent conscious- 
ness; and as he traces back the steps of that con- 
sciousness he marks the footprints, side by side 
with his own, of Christ's blessed Paraclete, the 
Holy Ghost, Lord of his moral life. 

But there is yet one more step for the soul and 
one more work for the Holy Ghost before the 
gracious victory is complete. There must be the 
glad surrender of faith that shall bring the soul 
and Christ actually together. Thus far his con- 
science was touched and awakened by another. 
His affections and desires were separate from their 
old objects almost in spite of himself. The pro- 
cess of change was hardly a matter of conscious- 
ness, certainly not a matter of volition. He has 
been the passive recipient ol influence, and to this 



The Holy Ghost. \2% 



point his active powers have been idle. These 
active powers are gathered and represented in his 
will. His true personality resides in it alone. It 
is the organ of his selfhood. Shall his will bear 
him on to the cross ? It is the pivot question of 
his life of lives. Is the Holy Ghost the Sovereign 
Lord of his volition ? Does God control the will ? 
This is the great question of the ages, perhaps of 
the eternities. It is the first puzzling problem 
of human thought, and human thought never sees 
its way out of it. 

Two parties of thinkers stand in opposite ranks, 
and can do nothing but flaunt their banners in 
each other's faces and claim the victory. 

Liberty and necessity, God's sovereignty and 
Man's freedom, — the earliest philosophy took up 
the question, and the latest philosophy has not laid 
it down. If the Holy Ghost is lord of my will, 
how am I responsible ? If my will is free, then 
how am I dependent on the Holy Ghost ? The 
answer to this question must take the form of 
compromise, or at least must be content with dem- 
onstrating the facts and leaving the reconciling of 
them to rest among the mysteries. We may, for 



124 Lecture Fourth. 



example, demonstrate the absolute sovereignty of 
God by arguments the most conclusive, without a 
flaw in the premises or a single hitch in the train 
of deduction, and having done so, we may sum up 
the conclusion, and label it " proved " and place it 
away on some shelf of the mind. 

And then we may demonstrate the freedom of 
the human will by proof different from the other, 
but still conclusive, — by the testimony of conscious- 
ness, a basic proof, the ultimate source and foun- 
dation of all conviction. And this conclusion we 
may label " proved," and lay it on the shelves of 
the mind. 

Thus we have the two statements, each one de- 
monstrated as an infallible truth by the only evi- 
dence that is adapted to the case. Both are true; 
yet when we take down these shelved conclusions, 
and compare them with one another, they are mutu- 
ally contradictory, and our reason cries out in de- 
spair for a light that God has not given. In this 
ignorance we must walk, content to know that 
somewhere in the hidden councils of the upper 
world the problem has a solution. 

It is a remarkable fact in the study of this con- 



The Holy Ghost. 125 



troversy that while man's speculative reason de- 
murs at accepting this contradictory position of 
liberty and necessity, sovereignty and freedom, his 
experimental conviction embraces them both in one 
fervid belief that makes the very life and joy of his 
religion. When any soul, under the lead of the 
awakened conscience and the heavenly longing, 
inspired by the Holy Ghost, does actually surren- 
der its will, with all its engrossment of heart and 
life, to the faith and service of Jesus Christ, the 
process seems to bear a twofold consciousness: on 
the one hand, there is the deepest laid sense that 
there never was an act of its life so profoundly and 
delightedly free as that act of self-surrender, and 
at the same moment there is a conviction, not less 
deep, that the freedom was not an independent 
freedom, that the will was not self-moved. And 
when the dedicated soul stands upon its feet again, 
full of the sense of its new, free, spiritual manhood, 
the first breath of its freedom will utter itself in 
the ascription, " Not unto me, not unto me, but 
unto Thee, Holy Ghost, Sovereign Lord of my 
moral life ! " Many speculative difficulties are 
solved by experiment ; and as there is no difficulty 



126 Lecture Fourth. 

so bewildering to the reason as this difficulty of 
mans freedom and dependence, so none ever had 
such an illustrious solution in the deepest experi- 
mental consciousness of the soul. 

But although the current of our life passes thus 
between two rocky abutments, rising up in a per- 
pendicular antagonism that no earthly theory can 
reconcile, yet we know that beyond the vapory 
height of our vision, in the bright depth of God's 
counsels, the separation is firmly bridged over, and 
the repugnant ideas are linked into structural unity 
of truth. 

There is another agency of the Holy Ghost, as 
the agent and commissioner of Christ, which can- 
not be passed by, — his agency, namely, in giving 
efficacy to the appointed means of grace, the 
preaching and the sacraments of the church. 

It is interesting to know, if we can, in what way 
a spiritual agency can work through material 
means. The word of God is the Sword of the Spir- 
it, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul 
and spirit. Does its Divine efficacy depend upon 
the sharpness of the instrument or on the suscep- 
tibility of the hearer and reader of the word ? 



The Holy Ghost. 127 



Does the Holy Ghost cause the truths of salvation 
to be any more true at one time than at another, 
or does he work among the moral sensibilities of 
the heart to make an entrance for the truth ? The 
word of God as a vehicle of the truth of God, is it 
not just as full of truth at one time as at another ? 
Is there an ebb and flow of meaning in his revealed 
word ? Is it not always full of himself? If it be 
the same revelation, then there can be no influence 
of the Holy Ghost upon the word, to make it more 
or less; but as God opened the heart of Lydia to 
receive the things that were spoken by Paul, so 
must it always be. We can conceive that he who 
is Lord of the soul's life can, by the affinity of na- 
ture, work among its motive powers, mellow its 
feelings, abate its self-conceit, exalt its ambitions, 
tone down its antagonisms, create a holy hunger 
and thirst, so that when the oft-rejected word of 
God comes to it again, it may find a heart already 
prepared and opened by the Holy Ghost. 

Its efficacy, therefore, lies not in any new prop- 
erty imparted to the truth itself, but in the quick- 
ening of the soul, touched by the kindred life of 
the Divine Spirit. 



128 Lecture Fourth. 

And must we not say the same of the sacra- 
ments? Is the baptismal water imbued with a 
quality of the Holy Ghost, so that its bathing touch 
shall send a quickening shock to the soul of sin ? 
Do the bread and wine take into themselves such 
a property of positive holiness, that they carry 
to the lips of every recipient the body and blood 
of the Crucified ? Material substances may be 
charged with material forces, that communicate 
themselves to other material things. Heat and 
electricity and magnetism are diffusible properties, 
and spread themselves by fixed laws of material 
affinity, but a moral force gathered into a material 
substance is out of the analogy of things. A prop- 
erty of unintelligent matter communicating a force 
to the intelligent and moral soul is an idea that 
has no resembling fact in all the world. Why 
should we suppose such a diversity of method in 
the working of the Holy Ghost, now influencing 
the spirit of man by conviction, by persuasion, by 
comforting, by awakening, by inspiring, and all 
by a direct illapse, — the moral grasping the moral, 
the spiritual embracing the spiritual, in perfect and 
beautiful congruity; and then directing itself to 



The Holy Ghost. 129 

produce the same spiritual results by outside un- 
spiritual means, — material forces acting to- stir that 
one thing with which in all the world material 
things are most out of harmony, the spirit and 
soul of man. The dispensation under which we 
live is the dispensation of the Spirit; and must not 
all his influence on us, and our reciprocal approaches 
towards him, be after the nature of spirit life and 
spirit communion ? To suppose that a material, 
mechanical substance can be charged with the 
property of holiness seems to wipe out all the dis- 
tinctions of thought, requires a revision of our dic- 
tionaries. Instead of that sublime exercise of faith 
in which the soul holds conscious converse with 
its unseen but not distant Lord, it substitutes a 
simple belief of the external fact that the Holy 
Ghost is mingled in with the matter of the sacra- 
ment. If the one be faith worthy of the noblest 
Christian manhood, the other would seem to be 
the inadequate conception of the child period of 
the spiritual life. 

Let us rather believe thus, then : The Spirit bears 
witness with our spirits, spiritually and not ma- 
terially, and though He makes a covenanted use 



130 Lecture Fourth. 



of those Divine occasions when God's word is taught 
and his .sacraments are administered, to quicken 
our affections, strengthen our faith, exalt our 
hopes, fortify our consciences, and to stamp our 
souls with the seal of his assurance, yet is he not 
fettered to occasions nor incorporated with mate- 
rial means; but with the glorious power of his om- 
nipresence he besets us behind and before, about 
our path and about our bed, strengthens, comforts, 
upholds us, gives us grace to live as becomes us 
and to die in the peace of his felt communion. In 
a word, he takes the things of Christ and shows 
them to us, stands to us in Christ's place, as if he 
were Christ, making us to know all that we can 
know of Christ on earth, and then, as the Lord of 
our lives, presenting us, cleansed with his own 
unction, to the adorable Saviour, whom not having 
seen the Holy Ghost had taught us to love, and in 
him to rejoice with a joy unspeakable and full of 
glory. Then the vicegerent office of the Holy 
Ghost is fulfilled, though his sweetness abides with 
us forever in the communion of Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost, with the redeemed, who shall die no 
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